I’ve been following the eight installments of Patrick M. Byrne since he began his string of posts which are now completed and updated. They are the most detailed on Trump's last days in the White House, that only someone from Trumps inner circle could provide. As friend and confidant he says it like it is.

His exposé of President Trump reads like a first person novel. These eight chapters are a compelling read, highlighted by his writing style with parts linked to video sources and other references. On this page I have taken the liberty of combining all chapters eliminating charts and graphics. - WW

How Donald Trump Lost His Presidency


In Eight Parts
Preface:  |  Introduction  |  The President’s Teams  |  Foreign Interference?  |  Crashing the White House  |  Christmas Doldrums  |  Agitation & Chaos  |  The Aftermath


by Patrick M. Byrne


Preface


I had a ringside seat to election events from November 3, 2020 to January 6, 2021, and feel a duty to explain to the world what really happened. I will not be regurgitating the headline events anyone can read, but will aim to explain what was going on behind the scenes, and give my best account of why things played out as they did.


Out of an interest in not letting the public suffer any longer from my procrastination and weakness (I tested negative today after a 13-day bout with Covid) , I will be writing and publishing this story in installments, reserving  the right to re-edit as I go. Once complete and final, I will let the public know that it is final. Thus, you might think of this exercise as an odd one, where I am drafting a long magazine article for the world but doing so publicly, that the public need not wait to begin having its understandable curiosity addressed.


It will be natural for the reader to question my motives, my background, to wonder if I have some ax to grind or might wish to accomplish something in writing this other than what I claim (that I simply feel a duty to my country and to history to give an honest account of what I saw over those nine weeks).  So I will close this preface with four statements that clarify my philosophical orientation here.

    My own family’s history is one of the Horatio Alger dream. My folks were of working class Irish roots from New Jersey (Bridgeport, Paterson, Atlantic City, Wildwood, and Cape May). My Pop was Rutgers ’52 (Air Force ROTC), and my folks were living poor as church-mice on the GI Bill at University of  Michigan, my Pop studying actuarial math, when their three sons began popping into existence. I was the youngest, born in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, in 1962.  We grew up bouncing around New England as my father changed life insurance jobs nearly every year. Passed over in 1976 in Hartford for a promotion at Travelers Insurance that he thought he deserved, my Pop took a job at a broken and nearly insolvent auto insurer in the South: a month later an odd fellow from Omaha showed up on our doorstep, met my dad, and began investing heavily in his new firm. That same day, my Pop cancelled his order for our family’s first new car (a station wagon) and sunk it into stock in his new friend’s firm. My dad’s new firm, GEICO, went on to big things, and my dad’s investment in the stock of his new Omaha friend, Warren Buffett, also worked out immensely well for our family. Most importantly, Buffett became my great tutor in life. As  the years went by my family grew wealthy (by the time I was 16 my parents were millionaires, and by the time I finished college they were millionaires many times over), and Buffett grew into a billionaire and then into the mythical figure he has since become. All along the way, a continual topic of conversation among Buffett, myself, and my parents, the most continual conversation, was the role of the rich in society, their proper behavior, their duties to other citizens and to the country (unlike lots of other rich guys, both Buffett and my Pop were always intensely patriotic men). Donald J. Trump is the living embodiment of everything I was raised to understand was wrong about rich people in America. After JFK, my parents never voted anything but Republican, but my mother did not vote for Trump in 2016, and by January 6 of this year was screaming at me, “This monster cannot stay in the White House!” My father died in 2013, but I don’t know if he would have voted for Trump in 2016, and I doubt he would have in 2020. So if you wish an honest account of the intellectual milieu from which I hail, that would be it.

    I have always voted Libertarian for President. So voting for Trump was never really a consideration for me, one way or the other.
     
      On the other hand, I agree with about 80% of Trump’s policy positions. Our nation is supposed to embody “consent of the governed,” and I do not remember “the governed” ever agreeing to disbanding our borders, or outsourcing our middle class to China, or signing up for forever-wars. I remember our elites doing that, but not the governed. So I agree with a lot of Trump’s policy direction, but still fault him for one big thing: he should have made ethnic relations more central to his presidency. And I am not sure that he did not, on occasion, tickle sentiments that should not be tickled (e.g., discussing how “Mexico is sending us their rapists” is bringing up an issue worthy of discussion, but can be brought up in a less disrespectful way).

      While I have tried to maintain a position of being Left-friendly in life, and was even at times Left-curious, I confess that at this point I find the overwhelming majority of activist Democrats to be intellectually dishonest phonies, lacking in the most fundamental understanding of what made our republic work and how to fix it, and I am disgusted by the Goonism they have embraced as a political creed. In my eyes, most Left Democrats are one step above loathsome, and not a big step.

    Having been inside this election fraud issue for months, having gotten to know the best brains in it, professors and technologists and computer scientists, the best estimate that I have heard comes from one of them: Donald Trump probably got  79 million votes and Joe Biden got 53-68 million votes. Through chicanery, Trump ended up with 74 million, Biden with 80 million. The professor in question may not be exactly right, but his numbers do convey my rough sense of the magnitude of the theft of this rigged election.

    This election steal should have been child’s play to reveal and reverse. On December 23, President Trump and I spent 4.5 hours together, and I let him know that defeating it was a 3-foot putt (I’ve never golfed a hole in my life, but I guessed the metaphor might speak to him). His team was pursuing a 40-foot shot from the sand trap that they needed to sink, but if he would just listen to Flynn, Sidney, and me, there was an easy 3-foot putt he was not seeing. Somehow over the course of that 4+ hour meeting there came a moment that I felt something much different for Donald J. Trump than I had expected I would feel, something that made me want to go put my arm around the man and give him a long squeeze of reassurance. What was it I felt? I’m still not sure: Commiseration for a broken man? A kind of love? Or just deep sadness, that I could see he understood he was failing on the most colossal of scales, he was losing, but he could not put the pieces together. Yet it was child’s play to defeat. I wanted to scold him and weep for him at the same time.
     

So that is where I am coming from.  Enjoy the story. I won’t enjoy writing it, but I think I owe it to you.


Your humble servant, - Patrick M. Byrne


Introduction


Why I Was Involved Before November 3 and What I Learned Because I Was (1.3)


(Warning to reader: this introduction is really choppy. I am just trying to accommodate the public by getting the blocks of my narrative up quickly. When I finally weave them all into one story I will improve the writing, add more links etc.).


On the last day of July, 2020 a dear friend of mine from Montana, a stolid, Native American fellow some several years my junior, visited me at my home in Utah. A few days earlier I had had surgery on my spinal chord, and he was checking in. He told me that there was a group of people, some ex-federal some not, some cyber-experts and some with other expertise, who were organizing on the subject of election fraud. My friend was adamant that I get involved and help them. My friend was quite a squared-away individual, and I took his advice and requests seriously.

The next day, August 1, my friend died in a plane crash: though the coincidence is troubling, I looked into it personally (I am a multi-engine instrument land and seaplane pilot), and it does seem to me to have been the error of his instructor (who flew the plane in a box canyon without the power to climb out).


At my friend’s funeral I met some of the people he had described. A sober, quiet man with a FEMA background and a deep knowledge of biowarfare; a retired Army Colonel with a background in Military Intelligence including psyops; other men and women with backgrounds in everything from law enforcement to cyber operations in military contexts and in support of law enforcement (such as, most recently, operating against human trafficking rings in the Southwest) to the study of reverse-engineering mass election fraud. For it had turned out that there were some irregularities in the Dallas 2018 election that had spawned a network of cyber-enthusiasts on election fraud. They were convinced that industrial scale election fraud was possible, and on its way. Soon some key players were dropping through and seeing me in Utah, and I, still recovering from surgery, was driving around to meet them in other cities.  


I am going to write of, "white hat hackers". I should make clear that I am referring to people who not only follow the law, they generally operate under authority and direction of law enforcement, or under contract with law enforcement at state and federal levels. There is a certification for working in the field of cyber-forensics, a certification that means you can crack open and image hard drives, perform forensics on them, swear out affidavits, and produce work that is admissible in court. Sometimes they are used by law enforcement in offensive cyber-missions (e.g., taking down a child trafficking/porn ring). The “white hat hackers” of whom I write are people with such skill sets, but who operate under contract to law enforcement doing things law enforcement needs done but which are generally beyond the in-house capabilities of law enforcement.


Now when I write, “white hat hackers”, I should make clear that I am referring to people who not only follow the law, they generally operate under authority and direction of law enforcement, or under contract with law enforcement at state and federal levels. There is a certification for working the field of cyber-forensics, a certification that means you maintain proper chain of title and  image hard drives and swear out affidavits and produce work that is admissible in court. Courts look for this certification. These “white hat hackers” of whom I speak who were teaching me about these systems had such certifications.


Over the next couple of months I was introduced by these white hat hackers to the security vulnerabilities of the technology used in election equipment. Obviously vulnerabilities existed, such as (per this CNET video, “Hackers target 30 voting machines at Defcon“), the existence of R232 ports such that any technician who can plug-in a chord will get root-level access to the machine without a password (thus compromising the machine forever).


Beyond those kinds of hacks, they began to introduce me to other “hacks” understood in the broadest sense. The extraordinary  privileges enjoyed by precinct administrators was confirmed simply by  examination of the operating handbook of one of the machines.  More explanations were given me of the reason for spikes in offshore packet traffic to certain locations during our elections, though the full reasons for that were not yet fully understood. A technique that in November  was written of as the “drop & roll” was explained as the core of one form of theft.


As the weeks rolled by I became increasingly conversant with these oddballs who were convinced we were on the edge of a massive election steal. They had meetings arranged with DHS in their state, and their briefings were taken at least twice in September by DHS and propelled up the chain of command…. only to be killed from Washington. In particular, a portion of DHS called CISA (“Cybsecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency”) put the kibosh on further meetings. This was odd because election security is within their mandate.


Then November 3, the night of the election, everything they had been predicting to me would happen, happened.  I am not going to make this essay a full account of the steal. ONE SHOULD SEE SIDNEY POWELL’S SUBSEQUENT LAWSUITS AT SCOTUS FOR EXPLANATIONS AND AFFIDAVITS: IT IS NOT THE POINT OF THIS ESSAY I AM WRITING HERE. But any political scientist can explain that to steal the national election one does not need “widespread election fraud”:  instead, with deep election fraud in five cities, one can flip the states they are in, thereby flip the electoral college, and thereby steal the election nationally. And what do you, know, those five cites (Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Phoenix) experienced unprecedented “shutting down” of vote counting in the middle of election  night on November 3. Some of those cities saw goons muscling observers away from vote counting centers on various trumped up reasons, while others taped pizza boxes across windows to block observation.In Atlanta’s State Farm Arena in Atlanta, a “water main break” forcing the evacuation of the vote counting area of and in the few hours when the courting was “closed”, hundreds of thousands of votes were pushed through the system, often showing 99.4% and even 100% runs for Biden, thousands of ballots in a row. In some places, security cameras caught workers in these windows grabbing cases of ballots out of hiding and feeding them into machines while counting was stopped for spurious reasons.


Now I know from experience there are those who say coyly, “But how you you know that cheating occurred?” I don’t have time for such people. Five cites play a special role in being able to flip five swing states; those five cities say bizarre unprecedented activity on voting night, up to and including the shutting down of vote counting; the water pipes knew just which cities to break in, oddly; in each case a huge spike of Biden votes followed in windows where counting had ceased and observers had been cut out…. It is just an insult to our intelligence. It clearly reaches and reasonable person’s threshold for, “That’s suspicious enough it warrants further investigation.”


Within days a self-organized digital army sprung into existence. Networks of networks of volunteers. People willing to research any question we needed answered, people willing to track down others and record their experiences; precinct voters who had experienced some of the techniques of the fraud first-hand, at a retail level; precinct workers describing extraordinarily lax enforcement of standards; freight drivers who had realized they were moving hundreds of thousands of fake ballots from one state to another. Lawyers who were able to mobilize and gather sworn statements. It became clear that the problem was not going to be turning up facts of the crime, it was going to be in managing the firehouse of facts that were pouring in, so many hundreds and then thousands of Americans were stepping forward with details of things they had experienced or witnessed on Election Day. These networks began finding each other and then finding me, as I quickly organized a team of people who could handle the volume. The cyberteam collecting and processing data, the affidavits coming in by the dozens, and then hundreds (ultimately I heard that 50,000 Americans signed affidavits) concerning their experiences.


We had much more than a rough idea of the various forms of election fraud that had occurred, in various permutations, on retail, wholesale, and industrial scale. We knew that nailing things down definitely would require examining hard drives and doing other computer forensics, but the rough outline of the steal was child’s play to see, and the mountains of new statements and affidavits that surfaced daily all just filled in points of confirmation within the greater theory.  Mathematicians started pouring on with their analysis that confirmed what we were seeing empirically.


By a week after the election I was in Washington, DC. The cyber-sleuths and investigators with me already had things perhaps 50% sorted out. They had the strategy behind the theft: pick those five cities to cheat like hell, flip their states, thus flip the electoral college and the nation (though more refined versions of the strategy evolved over subsequent weeks: we found, for example, that whoever was doing the stealing would also target heavily red counties and shave a few percentage points in each).  Reams of data showing machines processing votes in those special windows at 3X or more their actual capacity; statistical outliers showing up in results in those special windows that were of astronomical impossibilities, rivers of affidavits gushing in where people reported experiences precisely consistent with what our team had predicted was happening under the table.



      Rudy Giuliani      |       Sidney Powell     |        Jenna Ellis         |       Seth Keshel

Approximately one week after the election I walked into an office building in suburban Virginia, just outside DC. That is to say, a week after this election, my colleagues and cyberexperts walked in with a still-fragmented but still highly compelling reconstruction of what had happened on November 3 and the days immediately following it. We had the crime more than half-solved, and what was remaining was almost a mechanical matter: dig here, compare this with that, the answers will spit out. We can see they  were doing this this and this, but we also need to look at that.  I and my cybersleuth colleagues walked into that building to take a meeting with America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell, Esq. (esteemed lawyer for Michael Flynn, the “Peoples’ General”).


And that, dear reader, is where our story really begins.


All the President’s Teams


I am going to refrain from saying too much about mine and Sidney’s relationship. For one thing, over time it became something like I was working for her, helping her get answers to questions. Then, if I recall correctly, she became my lawyer. Whichever it was, in time the relationship became something for which privilege surely applies. One cannot selectively waive privilege, and just share things one wants to share while claiming “privilege” on the others. I know that. But what I can say is that our relationship started with me walking in off the street as a volunteer with information, and so I can talk about that phase of the relationship, but in time it became formal enough I will not be able to say more.


Mayor Giuliani, however, never became my lawyer, and I will not be so constrained in my accounts, as my ultimate purpose (my only real purpose), is to deliver to the public as honest a rendering as I may construct of the events between November 3 and January 6. It seems like a historically worthy thing to do.


For my part, though they thought of me as an entrepreneur, I introduced myself to them as the proprietor of this website, Deepcapture.com. I pointed out that back in 2008 it had won numerous awards for its business investigative journalism, and had also been voted the best journalism regarding corruption within the United States.  I may have done other things in life but in addition, I’m a journalist, and I have the rights any journalist has. This means I can investigate what I want to investigate, I don’t have to reveal how I learn things, and if I feel like sharing some of my findings with lawyers like Sidney and Rudy, it is no different than the dozens of other times this website has investigated things and shared its findings with lawyers, or even with law enforcement.


That first meeting with Sidney lasted perhaps 45 minutes. I found her sitting nearly by herself, perhaps an assistant and junior lawyer with her, in a nearly-empty space on one side of the office building. She was well-informed and open-minded. When I arrived, the air had the strange tingle it has when people have just had words. We quickly got to business, and it became clear she was on top of things. She was in touch with people from the earliest days of the creation of these systems, and soon she showed me that her information covered a portion of the narrative about which we had some knowledge but not much (mostly concerning the origin of the machines and their reason for certain design flaws). On the other hand, as we ran through what my side of the table had already teased out of the data in the three days since the election, she showed she understood what we were saying, and we quickly tied things into what she already knew.  It was a highly-productive first conversation, and she ended it by telling me that I needed to go to the other side of the office, find Rudy, and immediately tell him everything I had just shared with her.


So my cyberbuddy and I went to the other side of the office building, to Rudy’s side, which I understood to be the center of gravity of the operation.


I should explain what I expected to find. I expected to find a command post staffed by lawyers and quants. The quants would be doing the statistical work, driving answers that would feed lawyers being notified of the research into such irregularities as I have walked through previously, and would be availing themselves of whatever remedies the law surely provided.  I figured there would be a war-board, with the states in question having boxed out all relevant data, progress, and to-do’s. There would be an information loop, obviously, such that the campaign headquarters in each state would be on a daily conference call to receive updates on progress. Thinking that may be a fair bit for one 76-year-old gentleman to manage, I imagined Rudy might have some strong COO, perhaps a lawyer, or perhaps an executive, who might be keeping assignments on track.


What I found is this:


The place was 20% empty, and another 30% were packing out their desks.


One conference room held a large number of lawyers around a table. At least 3 of them were good. These lawyers were the mules of the operation. They were each assigned one or more states. Yet there were things going on at the state level or below, bubbling up organically, and local lawyers jumping in filing actions. I came to learn that between Rudy’s legal team and the campaign staff there was 0 communication, even though they jointly occupied 2/3 of an office story. And between the campaign staff and the activities of those local groups and their lawyers, there was also 0 communication. I did not know if that was for a legal reason or just the way they operated.  In time, I came to realize it was the latter.


The Mediocrity – I am not going to be mean about it. For example, I am not going to reveal the gender or other details about this person (other than to say, imagine a person who is a lawyer and who had once made a career at one of the better-known government agencies). But given how the Mediocrity went out-of-way to be horrible to work with, and because of how stunningly destructive Mediocrity’s behavior was, I am simply to refer to the person as, ”Mediocrity”.


The Commish – Think of Mike, from Breaking Bad. The quintessential cop. Tough, correct, and courteous, but stays poker-faced and dead-eyed at all times. Sits in meetings with his hand casually covering his mouth, saying nothing. When asked something, might open his mouth, and if he does he invariably has something highly intelligent to say. Making one wonder, “Why does he work so hard to keep his opinion to himself?”


The Mayor – Rudy Giuliani. I was in the hospital in New York for the late 1980’s, and remember occasional Mafia killings outside Brooklyn joints or some mid-town steakhouse (it was always good for business, they’d say). Rudy was US Attorney there and then, breaking up the Mob. I always felt an affinity for him because of that overlap in time and place. And of course, on 9/11, Rudy became “America’s Mayor”.  In the years after that we intersected a few times, but he never gave indication of remembering me anytime we crossed paths. His security company handled an issue for me when I was fighting Wall Street. I doubt he remembers, but when he ran for President a dozen years ago and came through Utah, for some reason I was called by local Republicans and asked to introduce Rudy at a gathering in some large Utah home. I studied up on him, drove over, and gave a short introduction on Rudy Giuliani to the crowd, lasting about 30 seconds. He took over and we shook hands, and that was the sum of my contact with Rudy Giuliani in his political days.


I do remember something from the Q&A that day that impressed me. A question on abortion came from the staunchly pro-life crowd. Rudy answered the questioner’s thrust, “No, I’ll never support a law that criminalizes abortion for the woman. Laws on abortion have always been directed at the activities of the doctors, not the mothers. I’ll never put a woman in jail for having an abortion. If that is what you folks are looking for, I’m not your man.” He lost 2/3 of the audience in that moment, but gained the respect of 1/3, among them, myself, if only out of respect for such rare directness from a politician.


= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =


So 12 years later, on a Friday afternoon at about 3 PM,  I walked into the office space that was being shared by the Trump campaign and by the law firm that was forming up around Rudy Giuliani to investigate, address, and challenge, the election irregularities which were surfacing from the 2020 election. 


It was nothing like the outfit that I expected to find (explained above), with data-gathering feeding decision-making feeding information loops to keep a large and geographically distributed workforce operating successfully. Law firms are notoriously poorly-managed businesses, in any case, they truly are, but the law firm-campaign space that had taken shape within that office was a particular shit-show. People wandered vaguely from meeting to meeting. The meetings I saw were run like bull sessions, with no agenda, no format, and no apparent sense of urgency.


Within about 45 minutes I was ushered to a room where I was to have 30 minutes with Rudy. Physically he was more of a grandfather than I remember, less robust, a bit more hunched, and a bit more irascible. I explained to him carefully the outline of what we understood at that point, an outline such as the reader might have after watching this presentation by the MIT Math Ph.D. Dr. Shiva, or the exposition by Seth Keshel, as well as the cascade of stories regarding porous security in election software all referenced above. I feared overwhelming him, so I tried to simplify. as I spoke he occasionally grunted stoically, and it was difficult to judge what was sinking in. Yet after only 10 minutes, I saw Rudy checking his multiple phones for texts, right in front of me as we sat together. Conversing with one of his assistants, sending someone on a side errand, or receiving a report back. It felt rather strange to be talking to a man who was paying so little attention, but the Commish, sitting on the side, motioned for me to continue. After no more than 30 minutes I was ushered out of the office, but told to hang around.


Eventually, I was brought back into a smaller room with Mayor Giuliani, and again asked to explain what I think happened. Realizing I may have overwhelmed him with my earlier explanation, and gotten him lost in the forest for the trees, I broke it down simply and slowly, like one would for one’s 76-year-old Grandfather. Again within 5-10 minutes he was fidgeting, grunting on occasion, sending people on unrelated side errands, checking his multiple phones for texts, and typing people responses…. Meanwhile, I tried to stay on track. Yet there was a moment 15 minutes in when I got a whiff of something in that small office…. Medicine? Booze? Just as I was taking a sniff to determine, someone rushed in with some unrelated issue, and I was escorted from the office.


Again I wandered around among the staff, most of whom were professing to know nothing about what was going on, and many others of whom were packing up their desks into bankers’ boxes.  I was perplexed and found myself drifting around the convoluted office space. 30 minutes later I was strolling outside some other conference room down the hall when I heard Rudy’s familiar voice saying, “…don’t understand a goddamn thing this guy’s saying…” drifting out of a doorway. Startled, I looked around the corner, and there was Rudy talking to whatever group of staffers happened to be sitting worshipfully in that conference room to which he had moved.

Several staffers pulled me aside in a hallway. What Mayor Giuliani  is going to need, one told me, is a one page summary. Very simplified.. A one-pager.


Another added, but with graphs and data.

 

Another piped up, And bulletpoints. The Mayor likes bulletpoints!


But no more than one page! Repeated the first.


At the risk of sounding snobbish, I was insulted at Mediocrity and these 20-something staffers giving me advice on how to write, and such asinine advice at that. I promised I would get them something by the end of the weekend. 48 hours. I requested one favor: any other requests that came from them should be orchestrated through one of their people, who would call one person whom I would designate among my colleagues, and that way we would have structure, and keep track of deliverables as we sought to accommodate their needs so that it would not all turn into a shit-show.


Then I left and drove back to DC. By late that evening, I had learned that there were three different open requests from three different people on Rudy’s team to various of my colleagues. One of Rudy’s people was only going to handle passing requests of this type, one only wanted to handle passing on requests of that type… And the shit-show began.


I do not want to claim that everybody in that large but melting office space was incompetent. As I said, there were three smart, competent, skillful lawyers (a fourth if one counted a Constitutional law scholar who was in-and-out).  And there was a superb, and astonishingly supermodel pretty, 21-year-old acting as a senior assistant (at first I thought, “That’s not a good look on you, Rudy”, but it turned out she was one of the most competent assistants I’ve ever met). Yet the atmosphere was one of despair, there was 0 leadership shown, staffers were wondering around in the dark, and the meetings seemed like sophomore bull sessions rather than anything organized and disciplined.


From occasional contacts with several of those staffers over the weeks that followed, I learned what had happened on that day just before I arrived. Rudy had declared, “You can never prove election fraud in a courtroom!” and had insisted that it was not going to be part of their legal strategy. The strategy was going to be to challenge things on procedural grounds: “This county in this state had one set of rules, this other county in that same state used a different set of rules, that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14 Amendment.”


So I was correct: just before I arrived there had been a huge blow-up between Rudy and Sidney Powell in front of everyone, ending with Rudy shouting at Sidney and sending her away, in front of an office of dozens of people. And declaring that none of this was going to be about election fraud, and putting his mule-lawyers to work on procedural filings.


Later, a member of Rudy’s team told me that initially, Rudy had not even wanted to do that much. He had wanted to make three more-or-less token challenges in three states, then call it a day. Sidney’s insistence that he was missing the Big Picture had caused Rudy ultimately to relent a little and allow a more aggressive posture to be taken. But still, nothing was to be about election fraud and the possibility of a mass rigging of the election. Rudy could tolerate hearing about a couple of hundred dead people in Philadelphia voting, but he did not want to hear about anything more sophisticated than that.


That Friday afternoon, November 6, just days after the election, I had, in fact, stumbled in on Sidney just as she was recovering from that exchange. And Sidney had sent me to talk to Rudy because she needed someone else to explain what she was herself just realizing: a new form of election fraud might have emerged that was not about hundreds of dead people voting in some city but was about the possibility of several hundreds of thousands of votes being injected into certain key locations.  Rudy had just not been processing any of it from her, and probably did no better from me, and that was why he kept trying to talk with me about how Joe Frazier (1944- 2011) still voting in Philadelphia.


Over that weekend, Sidney sent a brilliant junior attorney over to sit with me and a few of the dolphin-speakers (a name I use for the cyber-heads who enjoy geeking-out to each other in technical acronyms). That junior lawyer had anticipated staying 30 minutes, but after an hour and a half she went into the next room and called Sidney. I heard her tell Sidney that we had the goods, or at least a well-developed understanding of what had gone on in various states, and even specific counties.


From that point forward our relationship with Sidney was perfect. As we researched and discovered things, we brought them to her and her staff, and they would listen closely, patiently, and ask intelligent questions. And they began incorporating the material into their pleadings.


That being the case, I will say no more about how Sidney and I worked.


= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =


Mark Twain once ended a long letter to a friend by writing, “If I’d had more time I would have written you a shorter letter.”  In those two days after meeting the Mayor in his offices, I had time, and by Sunday afternoon I was putting the finishing touches on the most simplified one-page account that I could possibly create. My aim was to make the story so pared down that this time the Mayor could not lose the forest for the trees, that the Mayor would grasp the entire narrative in one succinct one-page bullet point read. At that point, once he understood the Big Picture, we could begin diving in on each of the sub-claims: data would be gathered, affidavits taken, and so on. But to begin with, Rudy needed to read and absorb a one-page briefing (in fact it was about 80% of a page), into which I had distilled the research of about a half-dozen different people who had been working down a half-dozen different alleys.  It was as pure a distillate as could be achieved if I say so myself. I included a second page of one graph, concerning one state, backing up a claim made in that one-page narrative: once Rudy grasped that, I figured, once we agreed where we were, I would then supplement with additional graphs for each of the other relevant states. Affidavits that were being gathered would be adduced to document each of the other points made. And so on and so forth. But this time we were going to crawl, walk, run.


Sunday evening I got a phone call at 11 PM, telling me Mayor Giuliani and his entourage were dining in such-and-such a Georgetown restaurant, and would I mind bringing what I had written over to them. I got dressed and went, but when I arrived his security told me to sit in the bar and wait. I did for  45 minutes until someone came out of the Mayor’s private dining room to tell me the Mayor asked that I not come back to his table (security was concerned about me, for some reason), but asked me to simply send into the private dining room the paper I had written. I sent it in, then left.


Later, two people in that room told me what happened when my paper arrived.


First, in the 90 minutes between 11:30 PM and 1 AM, Mayor Giuliani imbibed three triple scotches on ice. Nine shots of alcohol. Those relating this story could not vouch for what he had drunk before 11:30.


Second, in front of everyone, Rudy took my paper and read it for perhaps 45 seconds, then put it aside saying, “I’ll get to this later.”


Third, the Mediocrity was at the table. The Mediocrity picked up the one-pager Rudy had set down, and holding it between fingers like it was a turd, announced with a laugh, “Can you believe Byrne worked all weekend and this is all he wrote?”


Nine hours later, Monday morning at 10 AM, Rudy Giuliani took the stage at a joint press conference held with Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellison. Rudy was meant to give a synopsis of where things stood, and then introduce Sidney Powell, who was going to discuss the possibility of mass election fraud on a scale no one was yet comprehending. That it was not about a couple hundred dead people voting here, or a few hundred people who had moved away there, but about something deeper, systemic….. Unprecedented.


Instead of sticking to the plan, Rudy Giuliani got carried away, and huffed and puffed his way around the stage for 40 minutes about how many hundreds of dead people had voted here and how illegal people had voted there….. And Joe Frazier still voted! As he worked himself up like Grandpa, repeating all the same points he had been making for days, hair die ran down both sides of his face, unnoticed.


Nine hours earlier, he had had nine shots of whiskey in under 90 minutes.


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Another story that came to me from those times within Rudy’s offices: One Pennsylvania lawyer, a female, had taken on the job of a filing in Pennsylvania. She received a message from opposing Kirkland & Ellis counsel that was so threatening, so unprofessional, that Kirkland later had to withdraw from the case. Shaken, the female Pennsylvania lawyer turned in a draft filing but withdrew her representation. Rudy had had to find a firm, overnight, that would finish the Pennsylvania filing. He finally found a lawyer in Texas with election experience who finished it and got it filed in Pennsylvania. It made no mention of election fraud and was instead focused on the procedural Equal Protection arguments. Rudy only read it on his way traveling to the Pennsylvania court where he was to defend it: upon reading it, he apparently told his companions, This is the worst piece of shit filing I’ve ever had to stand up in a courtroom and defend.  He went into that Pennsylvania courtroom and was destroyed. Here is a partial transcript:

    Matthew W. Brann, U.S. District Judge: So it’s correct to say then that you’re not alleging fraud in the amended complaint?

    Rudy Giuliani: No, your honor, it does not, because we incorporate by reference in 150 all of the allegations that precede it, which include a long explanation of a fraudulent, fraudulent process, a planned fraudulent process.

    Judge: I understand that. So the amended complaint, does the amended complaint plead fraud with particularity?

    Rudy: No, your honor, and it doesn’t plead fraud. It pleads the, it pleads the plan, the scheme that we lay out in 132 to 149 without characterizing.”.
     

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We got a call from Rudy’s team that we needed to have a set of computer forensic specialists down in Georgia the following morning. They would be provided access to a set of voting machines they could “exploit”. The licensed and certified computer forensic people in question demanded answers, such as, “Where are the machines? What kinds of machines are they? Tampering and playing around with election equipment being a federal felony, under what legal authority will we be operating? Will there be law enforcement there to review and document all actions taken, for any chain-of-evidence questions that might later arise?”


The response from Rudy’s team was, “We’ve got all that covered. Get down to Georgia, stat!”


With misgivings, I caused the requisite people to fly into Georgia from various locations. They were driven to some precinct where, it turned out, someone had previously indeed vaguely promised that access would be given to some machines…. But that person was not there that day. Or had changed his mind. The dolphin-speakers sat around most of the day, they were driven to another precinct where, this time, they were told there was someone with a court order granting them access to certain machines. No such person was there, but a group of hostile county employees was. Again they sat around waiting for Rudy’s lawyers to arrange legal paperwork, but nothing arrived. After hours of waiting in the parking lot, in the early evening, they drove away, and as they sat at a traffic light a half-mile down the street they saw 17 police cars, lightbars flashing, go rolling by to the building they had just left. My cyber-buddies quickly and safely returned to their respective homes.


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Over the next month and a half, a number of my colleagues interacted with Rudy from time to time, afternoons and evenings, and weekends. Nearly all mentioned two things: the inordinate amount of attention he was paying to his daily podcast, and second, his drinking. His own staffers were mentioning it to us. Something was clear to all who were around him: almost every evening, and many early afternoons, Rudy was shit-faced. That, and his podcasts, were the only guarantees in Rudy’s life.


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Let me move on, and instead, describe what I have only previously hinted at. In the days after the election people were getting in contact from all over the country. Often, there were networks of people in various states, self-organizing and diving in on various aspects of the rig: what people had experienced in polling stations, what they had been told, what polling observers had experienced. These people sent delegations to find me. Soon there were witnesses to various events flying in, along with the “leaders” of networks who had found me. I was deluged with offers of assistance: volunteers from all over the country, many with backgrounds in law enforcement and military, were getting in touch through the grapevine and asking to be allowed to help in any way. It felt like anyone with half a brain could see the Rig, the telling patterns. None wanted to be paid, though at the expense of DeepCapture I would fly people to see other people and put them up in hotels to get debriefed.


So in that first week after the election, I was fashioning … exactly what I expected to find in Rudy’s office. An “operation,” of some kind. We had the cyber-guys already, and quants, before November 3. But by a few days after the election, we had so many witnesses and whistleblowers and people with relevant stories seeking us out, and so many were flying to DC to find me, that we had to set up operations in hotels scattered around the city. From our volunteers with a background as military officers, we found our debriefers and created a system where they were privately and professionally meeting with the whistleblowers and witnesses, listening to their stories, and crafting summaries. These were being fed up into a chain of analysts, who were jockeying those pieces together with information coming together from our cyber guys, and other sources, and building a picture of increasing granularity of what had happened on November 3-4.


Somewhere in the months before the election General (ret.) Michael Flynn and I had met telephonically. We had known of each other for many years, as there is a strange connection between us, a deceased man who had played a role in both of our lives decades past. Conversing with Mike was like meeting and speaking with another entrepreneur: we finished each other’s sentences and saw what needed to be done almost without conversing. At some point, he arrived on the scene, and I told him in detail about this assemblage of talents that had come together in various ways: the cyber guys, the quants, the flow of witnesses and affiants into our circle, our structure of multiple debriefers, our information flow back up to a circle of analysts putting everything together.  I had rough-hewn the whole structure expecting Mike’s eventual arrival, with the understanding that when he arrived I would be handing the keys to it over to him. Mike seemed to be pleased with the steps that had been taken thus far, within a week of the election.


I received a request from him to relocate the top of that structure to a location far away from DC, far away from any city, in fact. The information flow that was springing into existence was to come up those networks from around the country, through the capillaries of the debriefers and report writers, and into a central analytic station. I thought of that as “the liver”. Mere yards away, there would be an office full of lawyers acting as the legal intake for the information we were pulling up. In short, the structure I had built by instinct, he wanted to be plugged into the lawyers who would be playing the legal chess. We agreed that both Sidney and Rudy would get all output from this structure. 


I moved the structure to the location he requested. There was a team of lawyers in place there. However, around them, there were a variety of people with no discernible roles and who gave me the creeps. One ex-Agency female, a large, loud woman, and not a lawyer, suddenly became quite the unbidden organizer. Another participant, a cocky English man with a military background, suddenly announced that he was the gatekeeper between this room and that. It all began giving me quite a nasty feeling. But after only two days I got word from Flynn: things having been stood up and roughed-out as we had agreed (as had seemed obvious to both of us, with barely a need to converse), Flynn called and told me he wanted to fly in and take over, and have me go back to DC to start speaking to the public. We agreed we would cross paths for 30 minutes in a certain location as we switched places


I got ready to leave. I told the cocky British man that I needed him to pass on three key messages to someone I was not going to have a chance to see before leaving. He agreed. I said each one simply, and he nodded curtly after each. When I was done I asked him if he understood. He said casually, “Yep. Got ’em all.”


“OK, repeat them back to me,” I told him. He stared at me, unblinking. “You say you got them, so repeat them to me.” He could come up with nothing. He had not actually listened to a word. I told him to get a pen and paper and make three notes. He did so begrudgingly.


For some reason, I was supposed to take the ex-Agency woman back to DC with me. We drove to the location at which Mike Flynn was arriving. Once there, the female slipped off to the side and told someone that she had learned something that meant she had to stay behind. Flynn arrived, and we had 30 minutes on a tarmac together. We caught up, synched up. I told him that I had misgivings about a British guy who was at the camp, and about the ex-Agency woman who was hovering around me. Then I left.


The next day, back in DC, I received the word: the ex-Agency woman had made up a lie to get permission to stay, but it had all unraveled on her. It had something to do with something I had asked her to do or had asked her not to do, or some research, or something: whatever it was, it was a fabrication (barely a word had passed between us), designed to get herself turned around and reassigned to stay in that operation in the countryside. She was confronted, blubbered, and spilled the beans: she was actually working for someone else, and was supposed to stay down in that operation in the countryside, spying and reporting back. They also confronted the cocky British guy, and though I think he never broke, I am told he was definitely implicated in the minds of everyone there. Security walked both characters off of the premises. After their departure, a device of some kind was found wired in one of the key rooms on the premises.


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Now, this is not to say that all time was being wasted. The structure of information flow I described, the one that had self-organized (and perhaps I had rough-hewn), was taken over by a three-star General who had led a career in Military Intelligence, and he made it far better. Soon it was spitting out refined analyses that began informing and filling up the briefs Sidney Powell was writing.  We made sure that everything that was provided was also provided to Rudy.


That is the background to presentations such as the ones I have been referencing. Again, for an excellent example, watch Seth Keshel, here. Seth is a former Army Captain (Intelligence) and played a key role in that structure I just described. Seth is a quirky guy, a poly-sci junky, certainly on the spectrum, and just all about the precinct math. That link goes to a 21-minute video that provides an excellent example of the kinds of work that was being done within the structure that had self-organized, been rough-hewn by me, then received great refinement from Mike Flynn. For a good understanding of the type of work that was being done, you should watch at least a portion of this. Click here: https://youtu.be/xXMW9VNMPT4


Still, back in DC, rejoined with my cyber-colleagues, we became aware of a disconnect we could not seem to fix. The Mediocrity had evolved into our point of contact with Rudy’s team, and nothing seemed to flow well. On November 26, Thanksgiving Day, we were all sitting together in a restaurant in DC, and discussing their problems. How the Mediocrity seemed to think they were peons, were telling them, “Go here, go there,” with no explanatory information, no sense of “Hey teammates, this is what is going on, and we are going to work on it together!” Super-controlling about information, plans, access. Sitting there eating our turkey dinner, they gave me quite an earful. I had trouble believing the stories they were telling me. Among them were some horrible ones concerning the Mediocrity’s proclivity for hitting on people of the opposite gender, and possibly the same gender, in ways that were embarrassing to all present (one of my colleagues had been asked to go see the Mediocrity one evening, and when the hotel door opened the Mediocrity was standing in underwear). But now it was boiling over, they said, because that day they had received an order that they were all to be in Antrim, Michigan the following day. Again, Mediocrity would answer no questions about where exactly they were going, what machines they were expecting to find, under whose authority would they be opening machines and imaging hard drives, even how long would they be there, should they arrange their own rental cars, etc. None of it was being explained. The Mediocrity had just sent word to be in such-and-such a place in Michigan, stat!


Then, life being as funny as it is, we looked up, and damnded if there wasn’t the Mediocrity strolling through the restaurant not far from our table. We caught each other’s eye, and soon Mediocrity was coming over towards our table. Thinking it was a nice opportunity to pour oil on troubled waters, I received Mediocrity gracefully, intending to converse in front of my colleagues civilly, and get things back on track.


Soon, the talk turned to Michigan, and I was asked would I be able to get the right people there at the appointed hour. Thinking I might use it as a moment of management development, I gently suggested, “You know, when we get requests like these, it would be good to be better informed. My colleagues want to know things like, ‘Exactly where will they be going? Are the people there going to be cooperative? What kinds of machines might we be exploiting? What legal authority is enabling them to image one of these voting machine hard drives? Are people going to be staying overnight? Will there be rental cars provided?’ You know, just the basics before people get thrown on another mission like what happened in Georgia.”


“Look,” the Mediocrity said, standing over us at late Thanksgiving Dinner. “First, what is your corporate structure?”


We all looked at each other, male and female, Weaponized Autism and others, not previously having given the matter much thought. We were just a bunch of people who had found each other and were trying to expose what looked like a world-historic election fraud together. Finally I said, “Our corporate structure is that we’re the Bad News Bears. I’m the team coach.”


“Ok Patrick,” Mediocrity continued. “Here’s what’s going on. I’ve told you where you need to be in Michigan tomorrow. Be there. Or tell us you cannot, and we’ll find someone who can.”


In my astonishment I began to respond, and to my further astonishment, the Mediocrity began speaking over me. “I’m telling  you where you need your team to be. If you can’t handle it”


I used something I had not used in a couple decades, something I had seen an economist professor friend do to another professor, a Lefty, who had continuously interrupted him (as Lefties are want to do in place of having good arguments).  I just started speaking, “Well it may sound like I was finished speaking but I actually wasn’t and while you might think you are going to speak over me actually I am just going to continue talking like this until you shut up and I did not care if it takes all night because I know that it may have sounded like I was finished but actually I wasn’t and……” and so on and so forth. Without a break. For about 15 seconds until the Mediocrity got that I was serious, and was just going to continue speaking like that until the Mediocrity shut up. Which eventually the Mediocrity did, looking somewhat astonished, having evidently gotten away with such behavior in decades of federal employment.


At which point I politely said, “Where in the fuck do you get off? We don’t work for you. We are volunteers here offering to help you do things you have no clue how to do.  Go find someone else anytime you want. The way you folks work in this city is astonishing. If you ever try to work at a modern company like Google, or Facebook, your ass will be fired in a New York minute. You suck.”


I surprised myself, because I do not normally speak that way to people, but I did that time. Perhaps it was three weeks of frustration boiling over. I told Mediocrity that conversations with Mediocrity were constant games of narcissist deflection, how amateurish Mediocrity was, how anyone walking around saying “Either you do this or I find someone who will!” and “Failure is not an option!” is a mediocrity who may have learned management within government but who if ever moved to the private sector would get fired by noon. When making such requests of my colleagues, any competent person would provide relevant information. Fill them in on the mission, let them brainstorm, they’ll likely be able to contribute….


I saw Mediocrity was crestfallen, and realizing I had overdone it, I gently escorted Mediocrity away from the table. I tried to soothe things over a bit, and put a nice façade on things, and not leave Mediocrity embarrassed. As we parted, Mediocrity turned to me and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be with the President. I’ll make sure you get full credit for all of this.”


Exasperated, I returned to my seat and friends. Minutes later we saw that Mediocrity had, in fact, been part of a larger party, and walking out with that party was none other than Mayor Giuliani. I quickly saddled up to him on the side. It was about 10:30 PM, his step seemed unsteady, and I went to his elbow like one would escorting an unsteady Grandpa to his taxi. We tried speaking, but whatever he was saying was indistinct to me. Finally I told him, “Sir, this is not working out well with your colleagues. May I respectfully request a way that I might contact you directly, so we can keep things on better track?” The Mayor pulled out his cell phone and had me take his number.


In that weeks that followed I called and texted that number on at least a half-a-dozen occasions. Not once did Mayor Giuliani ever respond to me.


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Over these weeks there were a number of excellent White House staffers whom I got to know. Smart young men and women in their late twenties, generally. Some (but not all) were Trump enthusiasts. They filled me in on details here and there, snippets of what was happening behind the scenes among the campaign, Rudy, and the White House. One evening, once we were close enough, I let down my hair and said, “This is a shit-show. Is this …. normal?” One of the staffers (and mind you, a highly pro-Trump one) said, “This is it. This is the Trump White House. This is how everything has run for four years.”


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The Bad News Bears got where they needed to be in Michigan, when they needed to be there.  The Mediocrity was there, along with other lawyers and staff from Rudy’s team. They went to the precinct in which they were expected, and like Georgia, it was a bust. The machines were not tabulating machines such as we had been led to expect. No real authorities were there, or law enforcement, or warrants: just a mildly cooperative 75 year old lady working in a public building that had acted as a voting precinct.


While the Mediocrity hung around chatting up county workers of the opposite sex, the dolphin-speakers went to work. It turned out the 75 year old lady who ran the place had a story about how, on the day after the election, some people from “County” had shown up and instructed her to insert her card and re-run her machine using some different inputs. What she was saying did not make sense, and it was clear that they had taken advantage of an elderly woman who probably does not send her own texts. Finally she mentioned that, unbeknownst to County, she had kept both the paper audit trail of the original run, and the re-run, and had stored them in a closet. Our geeks got excited, and had her bring them out: they unrolled them on a long carpet, and in a few minutes of study, they began finding things. Alarming things.


The Bad News Bears finally got Mediocrity to break away from Coffee-Klatch With The Deputies, and pointed out what they were finding in the paper audit rolls. Finally they suggested, “You are a lawyer, right? Don’t you think you should be getting some affidavits here?” Startled, “Oh yes, of course,” scrambled Mediocrity, and did so. getting affadavits from the 75 year old lady and one or two other employees who had useful information.


Those learnings and those affidavits were fed to a Michigan lawyer who was pursuing his own election fraud case in Michigan. Days later a judge read it, and found it alarming enough he gave a court order for a formal exploitation of the Antrim County voting machines. The Bad News Bears returned to Antrim County and this time, with a proper court order in their pocket, they were able to image hard drives, and returned to base camp with those images. By working in staggered shifts around the clock, over the next four days they performed a month’s worth of work, first breaking the security on the imaged hard drives, then reconstructing the files, then analyzing them. That was all fed up through the system, and emerged about a week later as an eye-opening report that created a national stir, known as the Antrim County Computer Forensics Report.


Other telling things were happening nationally. Some concerned federal employees had been tracking events in a Western state, and were sure they knew how vote flipping was being done there. The problem is, the relevant judge (a Democrat), when asked to allow inspection, would insist on stalling for a few days, thus giving time for the opposition to go in and do a “smash-down” (a hacker’s term for fixing the evidence after-the-fact, in anticipation of an audit, and making sure everything ticks and ties correctly). But they made a mistake in one location, and their smash-down did not work. The data that turned up was so telling, and so indicative of fraud, that the lawyers went back to the judge arguing it provided grounds for a far more sweeping order that would let them examine machines across the state.  The judge agreed in principle, but suggested that the precinct needed to have its data verified again before he could use its discrepancies to justify such a sweeping order.  The concerned federal employees put the location in question under observation, and sure enough, that night there were three cars in the precinct parking lot. They were redoing their smash-down so that this time it would work. The license plates on those cars tracked back to a left-wing union which shows up repeatedly in the background of events of recent months. But in the morning the data was fixed, and no further orders were coming out of that judge.


However, unbeknownst to all, the scientists in question had recovered enough material both to document the original, and the smash-down.


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Meanwhile, back in DC, I was hearing odd things out of Rudy-World. I was hearing that he was getting paid $100,000/week, and there were those claiming he was just mailing things in for that paycheck.


More importantly, from others in Rudy-world I began hearing the number “$207 million”. The claim was that the Republican Party had raised $207 million to “stop the steal”. In one version it grew past $300 million. In one version of the staff rumor, the finger on the button for those millions was a high-level woman at the Republican National Committee. In another version, it was all being jointly managed by that RNC woman and the Commish, and they were keeping an eye to the future. In almost everyone’s version of the story, $100 million had been set aside by Jared and Ivanka for future legal defense. But whoever was in charge, they were sitting on all the money, and I can promise, not one penny of it was spent in any way to “stop the steal” that I ever saw.


So whatever Republican loyalists around the country coughed up those hundreds of millions, in donations of $10 and $20…. They were all fleeced. It was a big joke: there was a pot of hundreds of millions of dollars given by Republican rank-and-file to Republican Bigshots to help reverse-engineer and unscramble whatever had happened on November 3, and not a penny was going to any activity related to doing so. It was all being held by people at the top licking their lips.


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In Georgia, the fight became surreal. A young man who was dating the daughter of the governor got involved, then his car exploded in an accident (see “BIZARRE EXPLOSION CRASH IN GEORGIA – KILLS HARRISON DEAL” December 5, 2020). It was on a 4-lane highway, it got struck on the side by another car…then it blew up. The engine was thrown 75 yards. Videos of the accident (most of which seem to have been removed from the internet) show a car burning in a fireball: it was quite an ornery car accident.


Then the Georgia Bureau of Investigation got involved. Three days later, the officer conducting the investigation committed suicide.


One faction from Georgia had been in touch with me from days after the election. This was an interesting network of people with law enforcement and quasi-law-enforcement backgrounds. Since November 4 they had been reverse-engineering the Rig there. They had put people and locations under observation, had been filming varieties of activities through telephotos. They mapped and tracked numerous parties involved, and even tracked the organizers down to a small element, a Leninist cadre,  who were staying in a motel together and managing shenanigans around the state.  For their own reasons this network helping me needed to stay in the shadows, yet as the weeks rolled by they were providing good information helping us reconstruct what had happened in Georgia.


A technologist named Jovan Pulitzer (inventor of the now ubiquitous QR-code) went public regarding his technologically-oriented investigations into the Georgia election. The best short video of Jovan explaining his work is here:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyVRlaWHSeM&feature=emb_logo


Over those weeks, Rudy managed to schedule a few hearings in a few states. Some were official, I think, but most were conducted out of rented hotel spaces. His star witness was the Colonel from military intelligence with whom I had been working since August, who essentially was brought to these different states to report and synthesize the information that the Bad News Bears were surfacing.  He did an able and convincing job, but we all began to wonder: What’s the strategy here? Is there a strategy? Rudy’s strategy (if there is one) just seems to be a long march through the courts. Taking cases to the states and appellate levels. Imagining he is going to win by running the tables through the court system. But that was not going to work, as the courts are ponderous anywhere, especially disinclined to get involved in election matters, and were already setting court dates out past January 20. Yet Rudy just kept plodding along, with an occasional hearing, a daily podcast. It did not make any sense.


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One activity that began bearing fruit was our investigations into foreign involvement in the election. This will be the subject of a piece of its own.


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Mike, Sidney, myself, and others developed a Solution-in-a-Can. It was really the same solution we had started within in mid-November, but redone by a General and a top-notch lawyer: Under various orders signed previously by both Obama and by Trump, if an election had foreign entanglement, the President had a broad spectrum of powers. There was indisputable evidence of foreign involvement on countless fronts, but we were asking that only a narrow set of his powers be invoked: based on the information that had been turned up, the President should use his powers under the requisite Executive Orders to send US Marshalls and the National Guard into the five problematic counties, open up the paper ballot backups, and recount them on livestreamed TV. If there were no big discrepancies, Trump would concede. If there were big discrepancies, such as half-a-million vote discrepancies that we suspected might fall out, then more aggressive courses of action could be countenanced, such as re-rerunning the election in those counties or states. The recount of the five counties could be easily done in under a week, and if it justified further action, the entire resolution could still be achieved on a Constitutional timeline.


It was either that, or an election whose integrity was doubted by 47% of the electorate had to be choked down.



     General Flynn      |       Pat Cipollone      |     Mayor Bowser      |       "Mediocrity"

General Flynn drafted a beautiful operational plan for such a mission. One signature from the President and the whole thing would be set in motion. The teams created from the right military and National Guard Units, the precise directives to each… The most expansive version of the plan had recounting to be conducted in 17 counties around the nation, Democrat and Republican, so no one could claim that targets were cherry-picked (beyond the Problematic 6). That most expansive version of the plan envisioned paper ballot recounting, plus imaging of hard drives of these voting machines for further forensic analysis (but not “seizing” the machines: they were to be left in place, and just have their hard drives imaged). An uber-expansive version of the plan would have had the paper ballots not just recounted, but forensically audited (but we thought that was too much to ask for with the possible exception of Georgia). However, in a pinch, we could hit just the Problematic 6 counties, and even simply recount the boxes of paper ballots, and have a preliminary answer in 2-3 days, thus ending a great deal of national drama. Mike and Sidney had the legal research, the draft finding, the general’s Execution Checklist that would, upon Presidential signature, make everything run like a Swiss watch.


And yet, things slid and slid. Rudy went off to organize a hearing in a hotel room and wanting one of our people there to speak…. Days spent waiting for warrants that never came…. Absolutely no sense that there was anyone with a plan, let alone executing one . We saw the Constitutional deadlines beginning to loom…


The days turned into weeks. December came, then mid-December. Yes we had matters spinning in various states, yes we had cyber-teams inspecting packet traffic and finding foreign interactions, yes we were finding that every new voter in Nevada had his or her registration transmitted to Pakistan ISI, yes we were finding vote counting machines with wireless cards in rooms with smart thermostats that had been breached from overseas, yes we were learning why voting rolls were kept live overseas….. But Mike Flynn and I had a sense that our side was chasing its tail. That the other side was just running out the clock. And Rudy’s approach would surely allow that.


At one point I learned how the President was staying involved. Periodically, the Mediocrity and Rudy Giuliani were going over to the White House to brief him. Really, no kidding: the person who was so bad my colleagues had declared they would quit rather than work another moment with that person, and the 76 year old guy who had trouble sending an email and was spending at least his evenings sloshed, were the ones explaining to the President the cyber-crime of all time and what his options were. At first I thought it was a sick joke, but I confirmed it.  The Mayor and the Mediocrity were the ultimate point-people on the mission of addressing this world-historic event.


Flynn and I felt sick. A frequent subject of mutter between us ran along the lines, “Why the fuck are we doing this?” The president’s children were off, uninvolved, pep-rallying, or planning retirements.  We could detect no discernible strategy out of the President’s team, no marching orders, just an organization wandering around in circles and melting as it did so. A Mediocrity who was so bad, we had had to make special arrangements such that the Mediocrity did not have contact with our Bad News Bears, or they were going to flee. And the whole mess was led by a 76 year old gentleman, a man beloved by all including myself, but who six weeks into what might be the most sophisticated cyber-theft in all of history, still could not have a coherent conversation beyond, Did you hear that 211 dead people in Philadelphia voted? Dead people?!?!? And they voted! Joe Frazier’s father voted! Have you heard?!?


And then we would remember why were doing it: America’s brand is “elections”. It is what we do. We had a national election that appears to have been compromised in a remarkably precise yet strategic way, it shows the hand of foreign involvement, it may be part of a Chinese psyop to take over our country, and there might never be a free, non-goon election in America again. That’s why we were not supposed to quit, we often reminded each other.


And that is why, a few days before Christmas, General Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and I decided it was time to take a chance. By hook or by crook we were going to Jedi-Mind-Trick our way into the White House, maneuver our way to the Oval Office, and grab the President’s attention ourselves. With no invitation.




Was there Foreign Interference in this Election?
You Make the Call.

Suggest you skip this chapter for now, LINKED HERE. It's a bit technical with graphs & charts. So, Go directly to next Chapter below.



Crashing the White House (December 18-22)

On the evening of Friday, December 18, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, a sharp female attorney on Sydney’s team (whom I will call “Alyssa”), and myself decided to call an SUV and get driven to the entrance that serves the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is on the grounds of (and connects to) the White House.  We had a vague plan regarding how we were going to get through all the rings of Capitol Police, Secret Service, and Marines without any invitation: Sidney and Mike were the center of global attention, and we were going to try to use that to bullshit our way past them all and get to the Oval Office. Beyond that, we’d be playing it by ear (I did say the plan was “vague”). There was a fine young NSC staffer whom I had gotten to know who, a real mensch, and I called him and left a message that I was accepting the open offer he had extended to drop by his office anytime, and was coming over … right then. At 6:15 PM. Not knowing if he would play ball, I may have been less than clear that there would be some people with me.



 Maggie Habermann |     Mark Meadows     |          "Alyssa"

We were dropped off a block from the security gate, and walked through the light snow falling in the darkness. We got to the first security booth, and Sidney and Mike approached to talk. The Police and Secret Service saw it was General Flynn (“The People’s General”), and stiffened to attention. There was no appointment scheduled but they clearly were confused and trying to figure out what to say. Suddenly my staffer-buddy came out from inside, and when he saw Flynn and Sidney he froze and looked at me with raised eyebrows. I gestured that we were all together, and he looked shocked for a moment….. then did the right thing, strode over to the guard, flashed his ID, and asked him to let us all in, even though none of the requisite paperwork was arranged. With muted relief the guards quickly said, “Take care, General” and we were through the first layer. For the second layer my staffer-buddy and another of his colleagues who had joined up walked into the inner ring entrance before us, and spoke for us: again, when they saw Mike the guards again all stiffened to attention, looked puzzled for a moment (I think there is no such thing as a high-level visitor like that coming in without it being in the books), then briskly and professionally processed us all through as quickly as they could. They were silent and asked no questions, apparently guessing we might not have good answers if they did. I was the last one through, and as they handed my ID back to me one leaned in and said quietly and intimately, “Thank you Mr. Byrne.” I was surprised, and it was the first time I understood that in the constellation of Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, there was a faint little star of my own.


We were ushered inside to an office, to use as Base Camp.


If I recall correctly, we were in Base Camp for about 30 minutes before making a move for the office of another NSC staffer, another young and principled person, with an office closer to the Oval Office. Camp 2.


Once there, Mike Flynn made contact with someone with whom he had worked in his brief stint as National Security Advisor, someone with an office that could serve as Camp 3, from which would come the final assault on the summit (the Oval Office).  “Hey yes it’s Mike, how you’ve been? ….. Oh my Gosh, so great to hear your voice too….. Yeah yeah, it was unbelievable…. Where am I? Oh actually I’m in the White House! Yeah, just came by to see … See me? Sure well how about I just swing by… sure sure see you in  a moment.”


We launched for Camp 3. And sure enough, when we got there, as Mike Flynn stood talking to his former colleague, Sidney and I had a 20 foot line of site down into the empty Oval Office…… After a few minutes, through a private door on the far side, Donald Trump walked into the Oval Office. He was dressed in a sharply creased blue suit and tie, still, at 7:30 PM. He came through and glanced out the doorway to where Sidney Powell and I were already walking towards him, greeting him like he should be expecting us. President Trump’s eyebrows knitted in puzzlement but his face showed he recognized us, and after a moment he beckoned us in. Within seconds General Flynn, Sydney Powell, and I were all sitting in the Oval Office with President Donald J. Trump, with the door shut behind us.


So that happened. Really.


The President sat across the Resolute desk and made small chat with Mike, asked him how he’d been. It had been almost four years since they had seen each other (when Flynn had left the White House, weeks into Trump’s first term). He asked after Sidney as well. I gave and received no more than a nod, letting Mike and Sidney take the lead. As I have noted publicly, the first thing I noticed about him was how measured, gracious, and even soft-spoken Trump seemed to be, so unlike the character that has beamed at us for years through the media.


Eventually he glanced at me again, raised an eyebrow, and gave a small chuckle. Apparently he knew about me, as I thought my be the case. He said something quietly, civil and kind.  I said, “Thank you Mr. President…” He cocked his head quizzically and said something softly about knowing that I had not voted for him, and had said a number of critical things of him. I let him know the truth, that I had said some harsh things before the 2016 election, but while he was President my estimation of him had grown, and that in any case none of it was relevant, that I was there because I was confident the election had been hacked.  I told him, “We think there is a much shorter route through all of this than your team is pursuing,” I closed saying, “But Sir, entrepreneur to entrepreneur, I feel I must mention something. As you may know, I have been swimming around the outside of your administration for a couple months now, and I must tell you, I do not think you are being well-served by many people in the White House. I can bring in young staffers who will tell you that some of your senior leadership don’t want you to win. They want you to concede.”


The President raised his eyebrows at my frankness.  Then, like a man who knew the answer, he asked quietly, “Why?”


“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I hear people are getting signals that if they’re good boys and get you out the door, there will be jobs waiting for them. But if they don’t, they won’t be getting offers from the right law firms, they won’t be getting invitations from the right country clubs, they won’t be getting invited to the socialite parties on Manhattan…” Trump grimaced, and we moved on.


Sidney and Mike began walking the President through things from our perspective. In brief: there was a quick way to resolve this national crisis because he had power to act in ways he was not understanding. Under an Executive Order that he had signed in 2018, and another Executive Order that President Obama had signed in 2015, he could “find” that there was adequate evidence of foreign interference with the election, and while doing so would give him authority to do a number of big things, all he had to do was one small thing: direct a federal force (we suggested US Marshall Service + National Guard) to go to the six counties in question (the Problematic 6), and re-count (on livestream TV) the paper ballots that were held as fail-safe back-up. It would only take a few days. Even more conclusive would be if they imaged the hard-drives and those images could be examined forensically (which would make the project last no more than a week, as we had already cracked the Antrim County machines and knew precisely what to do going forward). In either case, if there was no mischief found, then President Trump would concede the election. But if (as we suspected) evidence of hundreds of thousands of improper votes was found in each of the six counties in question, then he would have a wide variety of options. He might have those six states re-counted. Or he might have 50 states recounted on livestream TV by federal forces, and America would finally have its answer to, “How much election fraud does our nation suffer?” Or he might skip that and have the National Guard re-run the elections in those six states. We pointed out that, it being December 18, if he signed the paperwork we had brought with us, we could have the first stage (recounting the Problematic 6 counties) finished before Christmas. And even if the result was hinky enough it demanded a rerun of the election in those states, it could be done before January 20, so that the January 20 Constitutional deadline would not be disrupted. The more time that he let slide by, the more compressed things would become. If he waited to see what the January 6 outcome was, however, and then decided to follow a plan such as ours, it would engender accusations of “sore-loserism”, so he had to act quickly. The alternative was an election that 47% of Americans doubted, which would not go down peacefully.


“You know Pat,” he said to me (the only people who call me “Pat” are either friends from childhood, or men from a background like my own family’s), “you know…” He caught my eye and gave a little snort of humor. “You know, I could leave here and my life would be really …. fine. I could be with my family, my friends, I could be playing golf …” We looked at each other and shared a moment as may occur only with CEO’s and other “leaders”: people think our lives are glamorous, but in many ways they are unpleasant. I had a little flashback: the first time I was running a firm, a 24-person manufacturer of industrial torch tips in New Hampshire, I went on a sales trip to Europe. Some great colleagues (engineers) and I spent a couple weeks of crawling around on plasma machines in a shipyard in Spain, a crane manufacturer in Belgium, knocking on factory doors in Hamburg, then attending a gigantic conference in Essen so we could walk around getting business cards and grabbing people to sit with us for a bagel to hear a sales pitch because we could not afford our own booth, but we needed a big order so we could make payroll the next quarter.  After a few weeks of it we were home to New Hampshire, being received by colleagues like we were jet-setting royalty. “Oh Spain! How was Spain? Belgium! Germany!… Gosh I always wanted to travel, what was it like?”  That’s when I realized that people do not understand how being in such leadership positions is generally not nearly as fun as people think, dreaming of taking it easy, of being able to take a walk without worrying about the (in my case at the time dozens, in Trump’s case, hundreds of millions) of people depending upon you.  I understood why Trump was chuckling, and I nodded and chuckled along with him. I got just what he was hinting: he was thinking that from a personal (74 year old’s) standpoint, leaving the White House and going to Florida and golfing had a real appeal. “So Pat, on January 20 I could walk to Marine One and climb aboard and go have a really good life….” He continued, talking softly to me, directly. “But this? Knowing I was cheated, that they rigged this election? How can I just walk away from that?”


Other than that, of that first 30 minutes we had alone with the President, most of the conversation was among the President, Mike, and Sidney, so I had a lot of time to watch and study President Trump, and I was surprised on many fronts. When he questioned Sidney’s legal reasoning that he had the power to do such a thing, she pulled out the Executive Order he had signed in 2018 and described one from Obama in 2015: Trump took the E.O. and scanned it quickly, then began asking pertinent questions from it. The same with the finding that he would need to sign: he asked questions of both Sidney (regarding legalities) and Mike (regarding substance), who discussed with him the kinds of information regarding foreign interference covered in the last chapter. Throughout what I saw was a sharp executive mind, taking in information quickly and calculating decision-trees. It takes a lot to impress me that quickly, but what I saw was a sharp mind in action. It surprised me how I had seen no mention of it in four years.


Finally, Trump stopped and scanned the three of us, and asked simply. “So what are you saying?” Thinking of the difference between the highly organized and disciplined approach I had experienced with Flynn and Sidney, versus the college sophomore bull-session approach of the Campaign and Rudy-World, I spoke up again: “Mr. President, I think you should appoint Sidney Powell your Special Counsel on these election matters and make General Flynn your Field Marshall over the whole effort. I know Rudy’s your lawyer and friend, and he can have a great role in this. Rudy should be personally advising you, and we don’t want to do anything to embarrass him. But it needs to be Sidney taking point legally on this. And if you really want to win, make General Flynn here the Field Marshall. If you do I put your chances at around 50-75%. You should see how he well he has this planned, it would run like clockwork…”


The President shook me off, saying, “No no, it’s got to be Rudy.”


After some time (20-30 minutes), three lawyers appeared together. They did not introduce themselves, and stood huddling in the back of the Oval Office, listening. In addition, Mark Meadows and someone else joined us by speaker phone. Eventually the lawyers in the back began muttering things to make their displeasure and disagreement evident. Finally President Trump said something indicating this was new to him, wondering why no one had shown him this route through the impasse. I said again, “Sir, again, CEO to CEO, you are not being served well by those around you in the White House. I’ve gotten to know staffers in your White House, and they tell me they are being told that leadership here is telling them to get you to concede.”


Trump started to say something to Mike and Sidney, but he stopped himself and turned back towards me. “Who?” He asked angrily, “Who wants me to concede?”


I was taken aback by his anger, because I thought what I was telling him was common knowledge. I thought it was generally understood that about half the White House was in on the program of getting him to concede, for that was the estimate I was repeatedly told. “Sir, I am surprised you’re surprised…. In your White House leadership is telling junior staff this everywhere. I am told that this fellow Pat Cipollone [indicating the lawyers behind me as I spoke, not knowing which was Cipollone] has been telling people since November 4, ‘Just help us get the President to concede.’ And for the last couple of weeks, Mark Meadows has been telling staff, ‘Help get the President into transition mode.’”


Trump turned to White House General Counsel Pat Cipollone, who began sputtering. “Mr. President, you know how hard I work, you know how many hours I have been putting in…” Both of which were mealy-mouthed, and neither of which was a direct denial, as was obvious to everyone in the room.  Trump faced him, his face darkening in anger.


“Sir,” I continued, “in 30 minutes I can have a number of staffers from within your White House  here to tell you that those are quotes from Pat Cipollone and Mark Meadows. This guy is lying to you through his teeth. They want you to lose.”


Trump turned, knowing I was correct. He indicated one of the other lawyers, said, “Did you know that this is his last day? He has a job starting Monday at a law firm up the street, getting paid 10 times what I can pay him here.” He continued wistfully, “Pat, can you imagine what I could have gotten done here, if I had not been fighting my own people?”


Cipollone and the other two lawyers scurried out the back door of the Oval Office. I heard them stay out in the ante room, caucusing. Meanwhile, the President, Sidney, Mike, Alyssa, and myself continued for a while walking through more of the details, reviewing some of what we had said earlier. At some point Allyssa, that quiet but razor-sharp female lawyer assisting Sidney, took over for a few points, and concisely explained aspects of the executive order, always clarifying with great precision whatever needed to be clarified.


After 10 minutes the three lawyers walked back into the room and stood, this time not in the back, but abreast and to the left of we four visitors: Alyssa, myself, Mike, and Sidney, sitting in chairs in a half-moon in front of the Resolute desk. Mike continued taking operational questions that arose, while Sidney and Alyssa handled the legal questions that arose. The three male lawyers edged closer to the front, and then as though as some hidden signal, they all started being bitches.


First was some comment about it not being right to use the National Guard. “The optics are terrible, Mr. President,” said one. “It would have to be the DHS.”  I liked the National Guard idea because we needed to reestablish trust of the American people in the electoral process, and the US institution with the most trust is the one where people dress in military uniforms. Yet the National Guard is local, they are all around us, our colleagues at work, our “Citizen Soldiers”. But perhaps in a sign of flexibility, Flynn and Sidney allowed as how one could use the DHS instead of the National Guard.


“The press would tear your apart,” predicted Pat Cipollone at one turn in the conversation. Sidney said what Mike and I were both thinking: The press is going to tear him apart? Really? What are they doing now?


At some point Cipollone objected, “Never in American history has there been this kind of a challenge to an election!” Flynn responded, “Never in American history has there been a situation like this, with counting being shut down for hours, foreigners connecting to our equipment, …..” and so on.


“He does not have the authority to do this!” Cipollone thundered eventually. Sidney rejoined, “Of course he does,” citing EO 13848 (and something else signed by Obama). “Without question he has the authority.” Alyssa whipped out EO 13848 again and showed the relevant language that we had just covered. Trump looked at Cipollone with an expression that said, You never even brought this to my attention, Pat. He said to Cipolloner, “You know Pat, at least they want to fight for me. You don’t even fight for me. You just tell me everything I can’t do.”


By this point Cipollone was getting hot under the collar. Raising his voice to the President, he said, “Hey if you want to do this you don’t need my permission. You don’t even need a pen or a piece of paper. You can just say, ‘I hire Sidney Powell as White House Special Counsel,’ and it’s done.” But then he went on with more objections to everything he was hearing, all of which continued to sound stretched. Even frivolous.


After half-a-dozen of such frivolous objections from the White House General Counsel, Mike and I looked at each other dumbstruck. Mike grew calm and silent, his brow knit in bafflement. Finally I calmly announced to the room: “This is the most surreal conversation I have ever experienced.”


Around that time Alyssa spoke up on a legal point: he clearly had enough grounds to find that those Problematic 6 counties had enough peculiarities in their election, that under his powers under those EO’s, he was sending in federal teams to recount the ballots in those six counties. It was a defensible, reasonable action to take (which she said in legalese). What happened after that would be determined by what was found. But now the three male lawyers who were on their feet began speaking to her rudely. They challenged her, asking something like, “What do you think you know about the law?” She replied, “Well I am a lawyer. I work for Sidney, and-” they cut her off, snorting derisively.


Flynn sprung to his feet with a grace and ease that surprised me, a surfer getting up on his board. He turned to face the three lawyers standing over and barking at Alyssa. In a measured tone he asked of the three lawyers, “Let’s get something clear. What do you think happened on November 3? Do you think was a fair election? There was nothing unusual about it in your eyes?”


The three lawyers looked down, stuck their toes in the dirt, glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and would not give an answer.


President Trump looked directly at me and said gently, “You know Pat, all my life I’ve had the best lawyers. People call me from all over the world, ‘What lawyer should I use on this? What lawyer should I use on that?’ But here…. You know, the other side breaks every rule in the book, but me….? All I have are lawyers who tell me ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do that…’ Do you see what I have been working with for four years? Can you imagine what I could have gotten done……” He broke off, then turned to Cipollone, asked “Where’s my Durham report? Where’s ….” and started rattling off his legal disappointments.


Standing there next to his two colleagues, Cipollone started shouting back at Flynn, still on his feet, and at the President. Still shouting, he stepped rudely towards us, standing over (and inappropriately close to) Alyssa from behind. Before I knew it I was on my feet, shoulder-to-shoulder with Flynn, back mostly to the President, with a mental trigger that if Cipollone moved another inch towards Flynn, Alyssa, or me I was going to bury my knuckles in his throat.


President Trump said, “Hey hey hey!” We all turned. With both hands waiving at us to calm down, and a quarter-smile of disbelief on his face, he said, “Heeey calm down….”  Cipollone turned to storm out the door again, his two butt-boys in tow. Before he was out Sidney said, “Let him leave. I’ll take the job and you’ll win.” Trump said after him, “Go ahead Pat. Leave. Don’t come back as far as I am concerned.” As the door shut, Trump said softly, “Ahhh, I don’t mean that. You know, Pat’s a friend, and…” his voice trailed off. I winced at the dawning of my understanding.


I took another shot at it with the President. “Again Sir, I know that Rudy is a friend of yours, he’s wonderful. He’s America’s Mayor. I love Rudy, I don’t want to embarrass him. But you should see how what Mike and Sidney have got going. It is so organized, so well-planned-” Again he cut me off, saying, “No no, it’s got to be Rudy…” On the inside I slumped.


There was a third round where the lawyers came back in to interject themselves into what the rest of us were talking about. A third round of frivolous push-back, but this time in the end it was President Trump who got ticked off (in a weary kind of way) at the push-back from his own people, the searching for things they could oppose. Again he muttered something to me along the lines of, Can you imagine what I would have been able to accomplish these four years if I had not had to put up with this? Finally, when President Trump asked why such-and-such a course of action Sidney was proposing had not been explored by Cipollone, the lawyer responded, “Well we’re not the campaign lawyers.” 

 

I did not even know what he meant by it, but it was painfully obvious that Cipollone was being purely obstructionist, coming from a place of, “How do I stop this?”


Trump sighed, and wearily said to Cipollone, “You know Pat? A few minutes ago you said that I can do it just by saying it. Well…. OK. I have decided, now I’m saying it. ‘Sidney Powell is hereby appointed as White House Special Counsel’. There, that’s it.”


“She needs a clearance!” interjected one of the other lawyers. “It’ll take months to get her a clearance!”


Even I knew how frivolous that objection was, but Flynn spoke up first, in disbelief. “Mr. President,” Flynn said, “you can do the same thing with a clearance. You can grant any clearance you want, on the spot, verbally.”


Sadly and defiantly, President Trump looked at his three lawyers and said, “I hereby grant Sidney Powell a Top Secret security clearance.”


Again they stormed out of the room. Again the conversation continued amongst the President, Sidney, Mike, Alyssa, and myself. That is where I realized I was having an emotional reaction quite different than I had ever expected. There was a moment of real warmth, where I saw him for what he was: a 74 year old man, tired, knowing he was being cheated out of his re-election, mostly defeated, ruing his errors, dwelling on what might have been. I wanted to walk behind his desk and put my arm around him, and tell him, Yes, I do understand now what you have been facing.


Eventually President Trump said that we would all meet in 30 minutes in the living quarters, in the “Yellow Oval” (I believe the room is called). In the meantime, Rudy was coming in and we had to find a way to make things work between Rudy and Sidney. As we parted he said, “You know, in 200 years there probably has not been a meeting in this room like what just happened…”. As he was leaving he brushed past me, stopped, and speaking low and quiet, said something quite kind and meaningful, showing me that he knew a lot more about me than I had guessed.


A few minutes later Sidney, Mike, Alyssa, and I were in the Cabinet Room. waiting for Rudy. It was dark, and we had to find a couple lamps to turn on. Mike and I were intent on making sure the meeting went well between Sidney and Rudy, so everyone could work happily together.


After 10 minutes Rudy came in, tying his tie, and said in not too gruff a manner, but with perhaps the gruffness of a man disturbed from his evening meal, “You know Sidney, if we are going to work together you have to share information.” I did not take his tone as being too aggressive, but one of trying to turn over a new leaf in a relationship, perhaps.


Sidney immediately told him, “I do share information Rudy. You never read your emails, you never read your texts.”


“That’s not true Sidney! I just need you to stop keeping me in the dark-“


“”Rudy I don’t keepo you in the dark! You-”


“Sidney you have to stop keeping everything to yourself! I cannot work with you if you don’t share with me!”


Within moments the conversation had spiraled out of control. After a minute of squabbling I tried to interject something helpful. “Mr. Mayor, it is true that since I arrived, everything we ever brought Sidney, she always said, ‘Get this to Rudy right away.’ It’s true. Absolutely everything we turned up, she told us to share with you. She never asked us to keep you in the dark about anything.” But it went poorly. Fuming, we all went up to the living quarters of the White House.


The President was there, waiting, and after we walked in the three lawyers joined again. Meadows entered as well. A waiter brought out a bowl of small, bottle-cap sized Swedish meatballs, with share plates. Trump motioned for them to be placed at the small table so that everyone could indulge, but the table was in front of me, for which I was grateful. I actually keep vegetarian from time to time, especially when I travel, but how often does one sit with a President serving meatballs from his grandmother’s recipe? And they were good.  For the rest of the meeting there were two and only two people eating meatballs: myself, scarfing them down like popcorn, and occasionally the President, who would get up, walk over to me, and refill a small share plate. Nobody else had any.


There meeting continued for a couple hours up in those quarters. No substantial new ground was covered: we walked through the reasoning we had gone through in the Oval Office, and explained the plan. President Trump was decisively onboard, and none of the other parties pushed back. Instead, they glumly asked a few questions about how such-and-such was to be done, and Mike or Sidney explained. Finally, around 12:15 AM, we all began fading, and wrapped up. We walked outside in the hall, waiting, until the President came out to say goodbye. We each had a moment with him, and again he said something meaningful and quite kind to me. But we were all exhausted, I think, and glad that the meeting was over.


I wish to emphasize that at no point in the evening or in any segment of the discussion was there mention of martial law, or Insurrection Act, or anything of the sort. All claims to the contrary are lies, propagated (I would imagine) by Pat Cipollone, who (according to multiple sources) regularly leaks to Maggie Haberman of the NYT. Even cursory review of Haberman’s writings on the White House, which never fail to give stroke to Cipollone, would support that claim.


A few minutes later Alyssa, Sidney, Mike, and I were walking on the sidewalk in front of the White House, light snow still falling in the dark. We saw Meadows and Rudy leaving out another entrance and walking away together to the west. The four of us strode east, elated: with Sidney Powell ensconced as White House Special Counsel, and Mike (even from the outside) providing organizational skills and his vast expertise of matters DC, we were in good standing, and I believe at that moment we all weighted the chances of our success high. As we walked home in the falling snow we confided in each other, You know, for me this is not really about Trump. But we cannot let a rigged election stand. If we do, it could mean civil war, and even a Chinese take-over of our country. All we need to do is follow this plan, expose what happened in those six counties by checking the ballots. If there is nothing amiss, then Trump gets in his helicopter and leaves, and there’s no civil war. But if we find chicanery, it will give an opportunity to blow this scheme up for the whole nation. Who knows how much fraud there is going to turn out to be in US elections? I think ‘a lot,’ what do you think? Around and around we went, excited for our success in the meeting, like we had been thrown a Hail Mary and caught it in the endizone. After a few blocks our long-forgotten SUV found us in the snow flurries, we got in, and he drove us the rest of the way to the hotel. I had my first good night’s sleep in weeks.


The next day, Saturday, Sidney called Meadows and said, “Well now that I’m White House Special Counsel, I am going to need an office over there.”


Meadows told her, “Yeah we’re looking into that, we don’t have anything immediately but we are going to soon…”


“Then I will need a White House ID, so I can come and go,” replied Sidney.


“Yeah well we are working on that too, there might be a problem with that, we’ll see what it is going to take, …” said Meadows.


We all had a terrible sinking feeling, and by Monday or Tuesday, we learned that Sidney’s “White House Special Counsel” position was not going to happen. The plan we had discussed so extensively in the White House, the one that got an answer before Christmas (and depending upon the evidence found, either permitted a peaceful transition of power, or justified more extensive federal involvement that would get to the bottom of what the intent of the People truly was), that plan…. had been called off.


Instead, Rudy was going to continue his slog through the courts and the hotel-room hearings in the states…


The Christmas Doldrums (Dec 23- noon Jan 6)


I stayed around in DC for the next several days. Flynn and Sidney left to their own worlds for a few days, but before Mike left we had a conversation. I will use this opportunity to share a bit more about Mike Flynn.


I knew from people who had worked in the field what Flynn had done to make himself an enemy of the Swamp. When he arrived in Iraq, materials gained in raids were being bundled up in bags, shipped back to Virgina to be “exploited” and analyzed and, a month or two later, useful information sent back to the troops on the front lines. Flynn sees the world like an entrepreneur, and set about to redesign the process, so that exploitation and analysis was done on-base in Iraq, the loop condensed into 18 hours, so that the next night when people went out raiding, they already had the benefit of insights gained from the previous night’s work. Eventually the loop was so tightened that a raid early in the evening in one location was generating materials that were studied through the night, and informing raids that were still being conducted at dawn. People I knew and trusted in the field were telling me that this guy Flynn had his admirers, but he had detractors as well, primarily those comfortable with the ol’ boy approach, disgruntled at the way he was shaking things up and bringing modern ideas into the Intelligence Community’s comfortable way of doing things. As his career progressed Flynn’s divisiveness to the Establishment became legendary, but in my experience, men and women I knew who seemed like bright, chipper, mission-oriented federal employees spoke well of Flynn, and the Mediocrities were the ones who seemed to hate him.


But being with Mike Flynn, I learned things about him that were new to me. For example, Mike 61, was a lifelong registered Democrat, in an Irish Catholic south-of-Boston north-of Providence Jack Kennedy kind of way (not in a modern Lefty, “Let’s shred the Constitution!” kind of way). He is a deep reader of the Constitution, and is one of the few people I know (besides myself) who cites The Federalist Papers by number in conversation. When discussing America’s modern wars, he sounded almost Chomskyan, telling me that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should have ended 15 years ago, but so many hundreds of billions and (eventually) trillions of dollars got flowing to the corporations that supported the wars, and these firms benefiting from that flow of funds had grown so fat, and hired so many lobbyists, that they fought in DC to keep the wars going so that the spigot would stay turned on. We joked to the other that the war was just “another Washington, DC self-licking ice cream cone.”


In other words, “capture”. As happens with my from time to time, I meet someone from a completely different background who has come to recognize the issue that underlies so many of our problems as a nation. That problem is that powerful elites have captured the decision-making cycles of our government, and turned it towards their private ends. The fact that from our different backgrounds and different lifetimes of experience, we had arrived at the same fundamental analysis of what is wrong with our country, told me that I my new trail-buddy was the right guy.


And again, we had a number of conversations along the lines of, “General, what the fuck are we doing here?”


I was alone in DC over Christmas, but I got a call from someone in the Trump orbit. The caller told me that I should get down to Florida, to somewhere near Mar-a-Lago, and it was being arranged that I could have another short meeting with Trump, maybe as little as 10 minutes. Because I was by then thoroughly convinced he was not listening to sound people and was missing the Big Picture in some ways, I seized the invitation, and went from DC to Florida to a hotel just a few miles away from Mar-a-Lago. I checked in, and awaited contact.


Soon I received a call from a well-known person who is publicly associated with Trump, although I do not know how tight they actually are. With him on the call was a colleague of his, and they were telling me to get over to Mar-a-Lago and ask for “Eileen” (name changed to protect the innocent). I asked for her last name, and was told, “Just get there and ask for Eileen.” I asked for Eileen’s position, or even what area she worked in. I was told, “Just get to Mar-a-Lago as soon as you can, and ask for Eileen.” I replied that I really do not like working that way, that I wanted to know more before I went. Again the reply was adamantly, “Get over to Mar-a-Lago, go to the gate, and ask for Eileen. It has all been arranged.” With trepidation I got dressed in my best yoga clothes (my others having been sent out for a rare cleaning) to set out for Mar-a-Lago. I called an Uber, and the ride turned out to be a tinny, beat-up Toyota Corolla of some years’ vintage.


When I arrived at the gates of Mar-a-Lago I sent the Corolla on its way. When I approached the Secret Service detail and told them that I was there to see, “Eileen,” the federal agents all looked at each other disbelievingly. “Eileen who?” They asked. “I don’t know,” I told them, “I was just told to ask for Eileen. I am to have some kind of short meeting with the President, and I was called and told to get here and ask for ‘Eileen’.” Again, they said, “Yeah, whose Eileen?” Again I had to tell them I did not know. The conversation spiraled downhill from there, through no fault of the Secret Service agents, but from their understandable confusion and sense of duty. I perhaps did not help the situation when I, noticing that one of the agents was a female with a light Chinese accent, in an attempt to calm the situation and establish some rapport, began rapping with her in Mandarin. We spoke for a fair bit of time, but it only seemed to increase the nervousness of the other agents. Around that time I began to think it would probably be best simply to disengage and get away, and try to work things out by telephone, but the agents were not having any of that.


Eventually the supervising agent came over. He was one of those fellows whom one meets and knows immediately he is not a guy with whom to screw in any way. Still proper but with a fair bit of aggression, he said, “Back up. Start again. We want to know your story. Who are you and what are you doing here?”


Not knowing where to start, I began this way: “20 years ago I started a company called Overstock.com, my name is -.” He interrupted with a snort, “Yeah right you’re Patrick Byrne.” Suddenly I got it: the shitty Toyota Corolla, my yoga clothes, the Chinese…. I showed my license, and this time it all clicked. And it clicked for me, too, how the activities of Flynn, Sidney and I were drawing attention. I was not fully appreciating until then how much attention there was on what we were doing, but it made sense.


In any case, the Secret Service agents became cordial, nodded to me, and several said, “Thanks for what you are doing,” as they permitted me to walk off the property, cross a bridge, and get another Uber.


I hung out an additional few days, waiting for things to be cleared up. They never were. But over those days, I was there on the periphery of the Mar-a-Largo crowd and the hundreds of Republican Pooh-Bah families that were down together for the holidays occupying most of the surrounding hotels. Swimming as I was on the periphery of the Republican Party bigwigs and its movers-and-shakers, I got a sense for the gestalt of it all. There were some terrific young people, intellectuals who could have deep conversations about ideas as well as events. There was a woman of my age or slightly older, a former executive at a Fortune 50 company, retired, who was exceedingly strong, capable, and intelligent. Then as far as I could tell, the rest were riff-raff. Rich riff-raff, no doubt: shiny-car riff-raff, loud and obnoxious riff-raff, self-centered riff-raff, dilettantes and poseurs and grifters of one variety or another, with Plastic Fantastic wives and husbands and doily children wining publicly about whatever subject or thing they felt deprived. People for the most part I would not be inclined to piss on if they were on fire. What I did not see were believers, people who had a vision…. Or anyone with a plan.


The day before New Year’s Eve I got a call from Our Man in Georgia. We already knew that in Fulton County (in which Atlanta rests) there was a County Election operation operating out of what was called, “the English Street warehouse”. An Antifa woman had accepted $500 to infiltrate the warehouse, take a bunch of photos, and seize blank ballots from different stacks. Those ballots could be tested forensically. I lined up two federally-certified forensic document examiners (old-timers in the field) who were willing to work New Year’s Day, and got myself to Georgia on New Year’s Eve.


In Georgia, I stayed at the home of some people who were involved in this effort. That is when I first met Jovan Pulitzer (though there had been communication for weeks between my cyber-colleagues and Jovan). Also present was a senior Microsoft security expert. This is the man who had found the situation in a counting operation in Savanah, Georgia: a tabulating machine turned out to have a wireless card in it, on the wall there was a Smart Thermostat, and that thermostat had connected wirelessly to the vote counting machine. Further research had confirmed that someone from China Telecom had come through the Internet onto the Smart Thermostat in order to connect to the machine. The cybersecurity expert spent the rest of the evening telling us about the shocking vulnerabilities in the election machines, their tendency to run on Operating System software that was 10-15 years old, and in general, how the technology was Swiss Cheese. We sat up past midnight cataloging vulnerabilities.


At 3 AM on New Year’s Day I received a text from General Flynn. He was still up working as well. He sent me photos that were then flashing around social media: down in Mar-a-Lago, Rudy and others from the entourage had rung in the New Year with a bang. Photos of Rudy, Don Jr., and Kimberly Gilfoyle drinking champagne, dancing, and Partying Like It’s 1999 were circulating through social media. Again, Flynn and I shared a moment of exasperated silence.


On New Year’s Day I was in the laboratory of the federally certified forensic document examiner, and one of his colleagues who had driven through the night to be there. They were quiet, professional, and I left them to their work. After an hour they reported: two of the ballots were printed in one print shop, the other was printed in a different print shop using different paper, different ink, and a different printing method. It being highly unlikely that the county had ordered its ballots from two different print shops, this was indicative that at least one of the ballots was a counterfeit.


Our Man in Georgia had the warehouse in Atlanta under observation. Bums with telephoto lenses were filming. With permission, I put out on Twitter a brief description of what we had found. Hours later, rented Enterprise moving vans pulled up to the warehouse, and pallets of ballots were moved into it.


The next day, a shredding company in a neighboring county got a phone call to pick up an assignment to shred. The truck pulled up, and loaded approximately 3,000 pounds of ballots. It has been confirmed to me that the order was paid for by someone with a credit card from “Dominion Voting”. The shredding truck pulled away. Through a mechanism I will not explain, that shredding truck was intercepted, its work stopped, and ultimately 10,000 pounds of shredded material was dumped out on the floor of a local police station, so there would be a chain-of-evidence. Roughly 3,000 pounds of the shredded material was the ballots (the other 7,000 was from prior customers). The shredding that had been order by the Dominion Voting employee had not been normal shredding (turning things into long strips); it had not been the special shredding (turning the material into confetti); it had been the super-duper military-grade shredding, where the ballots had been shredded then crushed down to spitballs.


An Atlanta DHS agent arrived and took command. A discovery was made: some of the shredded ballots had not been completely shredded. In fact, a few had stuck to the walls of the bin, and were whole. Also found, I was told, were receipts and shipping labels from the outside of the boxes that held the ballots: these receipts and shipping labels were from a Chinese print shop in the south of China. The DHS agent acquired all of these (and that particular agent is one with an expertise in matters Chinese, I am told).


Call that moment, “T = 0”. Based on the continuous reports I was receiving from Atlanta, here is how the next two days unfolded:



   T + 6 hours: Rudy Giuliani was informed of what was going on;
   T + 9 hours: Mark Meadows was informed of what was going on
   T + 18 hours: FBI arrived on the scene to take over. DHS resisted.
   T + 24 hours: I received a message that the DHS agent in question was highly uncomfortable with the political pressure he was receiving. If I understood correctly, he was saying that Mark Meadows himself (Chief of Staff of the White House) had called him and told him to back off the investigation. It was not clear to me whether I was receiving the message just as a bystander, or the DHS agent was deliberately causing that message to come to me, in the incorrect hope I could do something about it (e.g., get it to the President).
   T + 36 hours: The FBI took control of the operation. They instructed the shredding company to come back, and told them to pick up the 10,000 pounds of material, complete the shredding, then continue with their normal procedures. That meant the shredded material was mixed with water and acid, melted, then reconstituted as recycled paper.

Various aspects of the story I told above are documented in photos and film.


Meanwhile, I had returned to DC. I was still trying to get another 10 minutes with Trump. I wanted to repeat to him again that if he waited until he lost on January 6 and then tried the plan that we had been proposing, it would be soreloserism. But we still had a few days left, and if he pulled the trigger, we could have an answer regarding those Problematic 6 counties. We could have it done before January 6, so that the Senate might make an informed choice, or buy us an extra week to do more work, or or or…


At this point I will insert one important sub-story. 


In those days of swimming around with people who were in various proximities to the President, I was told something by someone very much in Trump’s inner circle. What I was told was this: Melania had been warned by a government official that if Trump served another term he would be JFK’ed. It may even have been someone in the Secret Service itself, in a “We will not be able to protect him” sense. The threat included another family member as well, per the telling. I find it hard to believe that anyone in the Secret Service itself would ever say that, but the source of the information to me had otherwise been blemishless, and the claim was that whoever (perhaps Secret Service, perhaps someone else) had said this to Melania, it was someone from whom such a claim would be taken seriously. Melania was begging Donald not to fight, and simply to concede and get out of Washington with his family.


Flynn and I were together again in DC, watching the approaching January 6 date like frustrated hawks. I had done several interviews and even a public speech or two where I had insisted that, “We do not go violent, we are better than the other guys, if we go violent we lose.” I thought it was too obvious to dwell on.


I learned that I had been invited to speak on the morning of January 6, on the South Lawn, by the Women for Trump who had organized the rally. I prepared a talk to hit two points: how our system of consent of the governed relies on elections that are free, fair, and transparent (which our November election was not). Secondly, we do not use violence.


I was torn between two ways of making the point about non-violence:

     Telling a story from Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead regarding non-violence (which I have written up on Deep Capture as:  Jerry Garcia on Confrontation & “The Main Asshole”).

     Telling a story I told about Moldova. I had been there a few years earlier, and a barman had told me of the 2009 election. Election fraud had caused a pro-Putin man to be elected, but the people knew it and had risen up in protests. Putin had sent hundreds of men to drift into the capital of Chisinau, and they had a mission: every time there was a protest, these Putin-guys had infiltrated it with a goal of turning it violent, getting them not just to protest in front of government buildings, but to charge them, break windows, occupy them. The Moldovans had been too smart for the trick: they knew Putin understood that both sides were playing for an audience, the middle class of Moldova, and if the protesters were able to be provoked into actually storming government buildings it would turn off the middle class and they would lose the support of the masses. The Moldovans had stayed disciplined, refused to let themselves be led astray like that… and eventually the government had succumbed, a new, fair election was held, and the Putin crony lost big.
   I wrote that story up as well: “A Message to Militias Across America Regarding the Goon-Left and Agents Provocateurs [Not the Lingerie]
”.


I was not sure which story I would use on the White House lawn. On the 5th, I decided that the crowd might not know who Jerry Garcia was, so I decided to write that story up online and tweet it out a couple times to the throngs who were arriving in DC, and rehearsed a concise explanation of the Moldova story to use on the morning of January 6 when I spoke.


Mike Flynn was going to be speaking too, we were informed, and Mike and I spoke about what we were going to say, what the crowd needed to hear. We recognized it as a unique historical opportunity: we would have perhaps 30 minutes to explain to the world the irregularities that had disrupted the election, and most likely had changed its outcome. We prepared to meet that challenge. We understood that some of the people with whom we had been working, the cyber-ninjas and scientists and such, were also preparing concise explanations, but the choice of who among them was going to be speaking was being handled by the organizers.


Mike Flynn and I thought that the morning of January 6 was going to run like this: there would be some speeches on the South Lawn of the White House. He would give a talk as “The People’s General” setting the moment in its historical context. I would talk about the fundamental significance of elections that were free, fair, and transparent, and then tell my Moldova story. Then we would switch to 2-3 of these cyber-ninjas and scientists, who would each talk for 5-10 minutes, explaining the clearest of the irregularities that should trouble the conscience of citizens. I knew from experience that any one of them could speak for 5-10 minutes and cause any thinking person begin to have grave doubts about the November 2020 election, but I figured that after the three of them speaking, 80% of the viewers around the world would understand why Election 2020 results had to be seriously discounted.


I got a phone call that evening from one of the scientists I expected to speak. He wanted to let me know that he was not coming to DC because he had learned that his speaking slot had been cancelled. I was perplexed, because this scientists was extremely soft-spoken and professorial, and I thought he would be convincing to anyone who listened with an open mind. I wondered whom they had found who could do a better job than he of convincing millions of viewers that they should be deeply skeptical of what happened during the week of November 3.


On the morning of January 6, Flynn and I and a dozen others walked over to the south side of the White House.  We were surprised that no special arrangements had been made for us, and we had to fight our way through the throngs. We were both given speakers’ badges, seated in a special section up front…. then learned that our speaking slots had been cancelled. We were perplexed, to put it mildly, wondering whom they could get that would possibly explain the situation as well as we could…


The show started, and soon Flynn and I were sinking into our seats in despair. One of Trump’s children got up and sang “Happy Birthday” to a girlfriend, or boyfriend. Rudy got up and spoke about Joe Frazier voting, again. Another lawyer got up and spoke. Don Jr. got up and with his chest puffed out, strode the stage talking about how the Republican brand was now the Trump brand, or the Trump brand was now the Republican brand, or something about branding. Around that time, Flynn and I caught eyes and shared looks of horror: it turned out later we were both asking if the other wanted to leave, but misunderstood each other. It was so bad that someone with some sense among the organizers had a change of heart, and came running over to ask General Flynn if he would take the stage: he refused. The shenanigans went on for an hour or more, then Trump appeared and spoke, much as he would at any campaign event or pep rally. In fact, the whole thing was more or less a pep rally: no effort was made to explain to the crowd, to the Americans who were watching at home, to the Senators who would begin voting in an hour, to the world that counts on America to be the leader of free, fair, and transparent elections, what had really gone wrong with the November 2020 election, and why we believed there were deep irregularities demanding investigation. No effort at all.


Instead, it was a pep rally. That’s it. A Trump pep rally.


The moment we could make a break from the front, Flynn and I and everyone with us made a dash for the exit. Flynn could barely contain his fury as we shared impressions: this had been the one last chance to explain the situation to the whole world, and instead Trump had used it as a pep rally. “He just does not get it,” we repeated to each other as we stormed through the crowd back towards the hotel. “He does not get that it is not about him. He put on a fucking pep rally. He does not understand that this is not about him,” we repeated over and over in anger and despair. In 15 minutes we were back at the hotel, both packing our bags, both sick to our stomachs, and did not leave to join the throngs moving towards the Capitol.

Agitation & Chaos


What happened on the afternoon of January 6 is the worst thing that could have happened for the Freedom Movement. Millions of people had descended on DC to protest the theft of a national election and to support people who were standing up for the truth. However, in the course of their protest, Goons stormed the Capitol. Five people died as a result. One woman was shot unnecessarily by police, two others died from heart attack and getting crushed in a mob, and one police officer was killed in a way that remains unclear: “Media reports have been conflicting — unnamed law enforcement sources initially told outlets Sicknick was bludgeoned in the head by a fire extinguisher, while others speaking on condition of anonymity countered those claims, arguing there was no immediate evidence showing that Sicknick suffered any blunt force trauma” (“A month after Capitol riot, autopsy results pending in Officer Brian Sicknick death investigation“, Fox, February 8 2021).


The same Mainstream Media that (over the course of 2020) described as “mostly peaceful protests” the actions of Antifa and Black Lives Matter killing 33 police, injuring another 700 police, and burning thousands of businesses, has portrayed these events at the Capitol as the greatest tragedy to hit America since Pearl Harbor. It is nice to know there is some form of Goonism in politics still objectionable to the Mainstream Media.  Myself, I eschew all political violence, not just ones convenient for me to denounce.


There are two ways to look at what happened on that fateful afternoon at the Capitol. I think they are both true, though which is more true is, at the moment, anyone’s guess.


The Party Line Explanation is this: splinter elements (200-400 people) of the millions of protesters decided to storm the Capitol and ransack it. Given that this Party Line explanation has been repeated ad nauseum by a supine and obedient press, and is currently the object of an impeachment of a man who is no longer an officeholder (go figure), I will not spend time developing this interpretation. But I do not mean to discount it, either.


The Alternative Explanation is more subtle, and runs along the lines of my story about Moldova explained in, “A Message to Militias Across America Regarding the Goon-Left and Agents Provocateurs (Not the Lingerie)”. This explanation holds that the events were engineered as part of a psyop to discredit those who were skeptical of the election result, and to justify a police-state-style crackdown by the Goon-Left on the rest of America.


What evidence is there to support this Alternative Explanation, that the ransacking of the Capitol was deliberately invited by those who would make hay from it politically? Let us review the evidence:


On January 12, an article from the Independent Sentinel (“Pelosi-McConnell refused to increase security! Capitol emergency began before Trump finished speaking”, January 11), appeared describing a Washington Post article from the previous day.


The Washington Post reported late Sunday night that the outgoing Capitol Police Chief, Steve Sund, believes his efforts to secure the premises were undermined by a lack of concern from House and Senate security officials who answer directly to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate leader Mitch McConnell.


Then quoting from the WaPo:


Two days before Congress was set to formalize President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund was growing increasingly worried about the size of the pro-Trump crowds expected to stream into Washington in protest.


To be on the safe side, Sund asked House and Senate security officials for permission to request that the D.C. National Guard be placed on standby in case he needed quick backup.


But, Sund said Sunday, they turned him down…


It was the first of six times Sund’s request for help was rejected or delayed, he said. Two days later on Wednesday afternoon, his forces already in the midst of crisis, Sund said he pleaded for help five more times as a scene far more dire than he had ever imagined unfolded on the historic Capitol grounds.


Besides the higher-ups preventing the police protecting the Capitol to increase their presence when asked, is there other evidence that suggests the occupation of the Capitol was to some degree invited?


 

Ratcliffe claimed that he had not wanted to deliver the report any earlier because it would have “politicized” the Constitutional process of selecting the next president that was then occurring. He was another DC Republican concerned about “optics”. Call me “crazy”, but myself, I believe the correct analysis would have been, “I should deliver this report on time so that the Constitutionally-stipulated process for selecting the next President is fully informed, and if that includes that the election involved foreign interference, particularly from China, I have an obligation to make sure that is known to those involved in that process.”


Moving on….


Sidney had left before January 6, but after the events of January 6, Mike Flynn, the cyber-ninjas, the dolphin-speakers, and I all prepared our goodbyes. We began drifting out of town to get on with our own lives.  Yet on the evening of January 7 I got a phone call at 10:30 PM, asking me to go over to Mayor Giuliani’s hotel, that he was requesting my presence. The intermediary said, “We are just about ready to hang up our gloves on this, but we want to talk to you about your ideas.” I put my shoes on and went over to Rudy’s hotel. When I got there, I found 8 people waiting in a suite. Rudy was there, along with the Commish, Mediocrity, a smart lawyer, and a handful of others. I sat down before Rudy and they repeated the request: they were ready to stop, but wanted to see if I had any ideas.


As I started to answer Rudy began checking his phones again, literally fumbling with two or three of them again, reading his texts, etc. For the first time I did what I should have done two months earlier: I simply stopped talking. He said, “No no, go ahead.” I stayed silent and just stared at him. He said, “I can’t turn these off, I might get a call from the President.”


“Then give them to” Mediocrity, I said, indicating the person to his left, and surprising myself at my rudeness. Then to Mediocrity: “Keep an eye on them and let Mayor Giuliani know if the President calls.”


Rudy was startled, but put the phones down and slid them to Mediocrity. Just as I began again to speak, Mediocrity turned and began having a side conversation with someone in the next seat, and again I folded my hands, stared at Mediocrity, and kept my mouth shut. I had reached the point where I was preparing to say, “Who do you assholes think you are? You call me at 10:30 PM, tell me to come to your hotel to share my thoughts, then don’t even have the courtesy to conduct yourselves like adults and pay attention?” But as I opened my mouth, Mediocrity cut off the side conversation and faced me quietly. Everyone else in the room went quiet as well, and looked at me.


In two months of dealing with that group, it was the first moment that they conducted themselves in a manner that normal business people (or even, “normal adults”) would conduct themselves. I realized that for the first time I had Rudy’s full attention, and not only that, I could see that it was the first time I had been with him in those two months that he was sober. There was no indication he had been drinking, no smell, no slurred speech. It was the Rudy Giuliani I remember from 30 years ago, prepared to take on the Mob, in command, focused.  The silence stretched on as I thought, then said:


“These machines were sold to the public with a promise: as a fail-safe there would always be a paper ballots to use as a backup. If there was ever a time, now is the time. The FBI and CISA have both opined that our election came under foreign attack. We provided evidence of that as well. President Trump should find that there has been foreign interference, and on that basis send a federal force of US Marshalls, or National Guard, or DHS, or FBI, to examine paper ballots in the problematic six counties, and count them on livestream TV. If there are no gross irregularities, he should concede. But if he finds discrepancies of hundreds of thousands of ballots, as we think he may, he then has choices. He can recount the six states, or order the federal force to rerun the election in those 6 states. He might even still have it all done by January 20.”


There was silence. After a few seconds the Commish stirred to speak. I turned to face him as he slid his hand away from his mouth, and stroked his chin. He nodded slowly, and grunted, “Yeah. Makes sense.” Mediocrity lit up, and the new lawyer on the scene, on my left, spoke up and began exploring the advantages of it aloud. Rudy chimed in, and within minutes they had it all worked out: it was narrow so it was not too objectionable, it generated an answer, and depending upon the outcome, it gave a route to Trump. I stayed another 30 minutes as they bounced the idea around with a spark of excitement growing. Finally they said they would be working on details and maybe even calling the President, and I took that as my cue to leave. I said goodbye to them, and put my coat on.


As I turned to leave the Mayor came and shook my hand. Then he tapped my chest with his finger and said quietly, regretfully: “If only we had another month.”


Truly, I almost blew up. I had watched two months slide by Mayor Giuliani and his team displaying no organization or progress. Watching them trying to get anything done was like watching half-a-dozen monkeys trying to fuck a football. But now I was hearing, “If only we had another month.” They could have had another decade and it would not have made a difference. They were the wrong people. Rudy because he is not technologically sophisticated, cannot understand a complex cyber-crime, and was frequently sloshed; a Mediocrity who was so bad we suspected had been sent to disrupt the effort; and others with their focus on a pot of cash that (at last report) was $300 million and growing.


I walked the snow-covered midnight streets of Washington DC to my hotel, and finished packing for my departure.


The next day, the 8th, I checked out, experiencing yet again at the disgust I feel every time I have affairs that take me to DC. Disgust at the people, their thinking, their sense of what counts as accomplishment (bureaucrats measure their output within the paradigm of thwarting other factions, not in anything that normal people would count as “accomplishment”), at the staggering cost to the country of DC, at the staggering wealth that has accumulated there (cf., “DC Suburbs Now Contain 7 Of America’s 10 Richest Counties,” Slate, September 2012). It has become Hunger Games without the archery. But there were people I had gotten to know over the previous several months, had grown to like and respect, and I had opportunity to visit with most of them individually and say goodbye.


I returned to my home in Utah by Saturday the 9th feeling under the weather, but intent on writing the story that you have been reading in these installments. By the next day I realized I had picked something up, and on the morning of Monday, January 11, I tested positive for Covid, as I had come to suspect. I took it easy for a few days with a fever of 101, still brushing it off, telling myself that, “On a Flu Scale of 1-10, this is a 2. They shut down the world for this?” I woke Thursday, January 14, feeling almost fine, with a temperature back under 100. I thought I was through it. But by afternoon I began feeling ill again, and within an hour my temperature was 105.4. I barely made it to a hospital, and when I did they put me on monoclonal antibodies due to risk factors too numerous and depressing to list. Dealing with that and the Covid Fog that followed cost me over a week.


Near the end of that, on January 20, on the day that Biden was sworn in as President, I got two phone calls from two different Trump White House staffers. They wanted to tell me a story before they left the White House for the last time. The story they told me overlapped and precisely matched in all details. I will relate it here.


On January 18, some loyal staffers had been visiting with Trump in his office for what was supposed to be a 10 minute goodbye. But the discussion had turned to the election, and before long Trump was rehashing the decisions he had made, wondering where he had made mistakes. The subject turned to Sidney, Mike, and me, and the plan we had brought the White House. Trump walked through it with these staffers for 20 minutes, I was told, before it clicked for him. “That’s it?” He asked angrily. “That’s all Byrne wanted to do? Count paper ballots in six counties?” Trump excitedly explored the idea, saw how simple it would be, and even brought up the possibility that it might not be too late, with his last 48 hours in office, to cause it to happen. The meeting dragged on well over an hour, the two sources told me, and they left with Trump fired up about the idea, with instructions given to them that they should figure out that afternoon a way that it could be executed in the last two days he had as President. But an hour later their office got a phone call: the President had had further consultations with senior staff, had been dissuaded, and the younger staffers were instructed to drop the idea.



The Aftermath


In my humble tale thus far I attempted to stick to what I saw, what I heard, and what I knew. In this final installment, I will cover what I think. That means I will be less rigorous and more given to speculation (which I concede openly here) than in previous chapters, as I skim across a number of subjects.


PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN


You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose —with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” ~ James Stockdale


Our Founding Fathers designed a Constitutional process for selecting our President. I recognize that the Constitutional process ran its course and selected Joe Biden as President. So Biden is President.


Federalist Paper 68 (Hamilton) argued that one thing our process had to recommend it was that it would filter out certain types of politicians and select another (one wonders which describes Biden):


Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.


The drafters also anticipated that state level shenanigans might disrupt a national election:


“It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder… But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief. The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.”


By bifurcating the choice into (on the one hand) “an intermediate body of electors”, and (on the other hand) a Senate which would examine and formally accept the votes of the Electoral College, another thing was accomplished. Elections can degenerate into endless barking over corruption, but at the end of the day, for an office such as President there needs to be a mechanism to guarantee that a selection is made. The system created by our Constitution, whereby electors are chosen and sent to an Electoral College to cast their votes, then at a later point the US Senate (by recognizing and counting electoral votes) accepts that decision, accomplishes precisely that.  No matter what goes on at the state level, no matter how corrupt the events, there is a US Senate to look at the facts and by accepting electoral votes, certify the decision. That bifurcation guarantees that at the end of the day, disputes about election integrity cannot swamp the overriding constraint that by some date, the victor must be established. That is the Constitutional process deciding the presidency. On January 6-7 that process ran its course. Again, it selected Joe Biden. So Biden is our president.


Thomas Sowell has pointed out that the Right normally sees fairness as an attribute of processes, while the Left sees it as an attribute of outcomes. For example, imagine a fire department sets up a system for testing and ranking applicants, and the test measures physical and mental abilities related to the job duties, then spits out a ranking of candidates. In the eyes of someone who sees fairness as an attribute of process, if the testing made no reference to race and purely to abilities related to the job duties, then whatever that ranking is, it is by definition fair.  The process was fair so the result is fair. But in the eyes of the Left, if the outcome has too differential a mix of Whites and Blacks, it is unfair. That is why (says Sowell) the two sides argue and never get anywhere: they can argue about “fairness” until the cows come home, but underneath that one word they are arguing about two different things: one is talking about a process, one is talking about an outcome.


So we are experiencing a rare moment where Left and Right have switched sides philosophically. The Left is saying, “The process ran its course, Biden was selected in that Senate process, so he is now the legitimate President.” The some on the Right are saying, “Yes, but that outcome occurred only because of unprecedented election irregularities which created an enormous and complex election fraud, which survived only because the shot-clock expired on January 6-7, leading to a perverse outcome that is unjust and unfair and does not reflect the will of the people.” Both are holding, in a sense, just the opposite view about fairness that they normally do.


If nothing else I seek to be intellectually consistent, and I think that justice and fairness are attributes of processes. The process mandated in the Constitution (Article II Section 1) ran its course, the Senate looked at the facts (as much as they wished to, anyway), they voted, and so the outcome they generated is the outcome. Thus, Biden is indeed President.   End of story.


It would be tempting to use the Left’s own playbook and continue saying, “Not my President!” (as they said for four years under Trump). By doing so one could force them to reveal their hypocrisy (as though further revelation were needed), watching them froth over a phrase they used for Trump’s entire presidency based on a theory of Russian collusion that Robert Mueller investigated and upon which he came up empty. However, I am nothing if not intellectually consistent, and as tempting as it would be to do that publicly for the next four years, it does not feel right. So with regret, I must again acknowledge that while the Constitutionally-mandated was corrupted from its inception by massive election fraud, the process ran its course, Joe Biden was the winner, and so he is, indeed, the President.


Now, having acknowledged that, I shall turn to the world of sports for proper semiotics. In 2007 Barry Bonds hit home run 762, the final home-run of his professional career (surpassing Hank Aaron’s record of 755, which had stood since 1974). However, because for much of his professional career Barry Bonds turned out to have been using performance-enhancing steroids (BALCO labs’ “the Clear”, so named because it was not detectable in urine samples until it was), Bonds’ achievement is noted with an asterisk (often printed in red: *). In fact, in the National Baseball Hall of Fame (to which Bonds has still not been elected), Bonds’ record-breaking 756 home run is on display with an asterisk:  


Hall: Asterisk will be key to Bonds display 


10 years later, Sports Illustrated wrote a story on the asterisk: Ten Years After 756, A Reminder of What Barry Bonds’ Record Really Means


Lance Armstrong won 6 Tour de France bicycle races. Yet it turned out that was also done with the assistance of performance enhancing drugs, so, as the New York Times wrote in 2012, his record will forever be marred: Armstrong, Best of His Time, Now With an Asterisk


I am going to adopt the same typographical convention for President* Biden. Referring to him as “President* Biden” accomplishes two things: it recognizes that he did, in fact, become President through the Constitutionally-mandated process; it also recognizes that irregularities (such as have been described in this story) marred that achievement. So Biden is indeed President*, in the same way that Barry Bonds owns the home-run record with 762*, and Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France 6* times. 


Q, “TRUST THE PLAN”, AND “THE STORM”


I still hear from otherwise sane-sounding people, and read in social media, assertions that Trump is really still in charge, or the military is in charge, or that there is a plan, that this has all been a big 4-dimensional chess trap, and on March 4 Trump is going to reemerge as President, of the Republic not the Corporation (or some such)…. It is time someone tells all such folks: that is all delusional. Trust me, there is no such plan. Trump’s people in the Defense Department have all left. There is no network of secret agents ready to spring the trap and restore Donald Trump to the White House on March 4. It is delusional to think otherwise. The brutal fact of our current reality is that (as a result of a process riddled with election fraud), we have a President* Biden. If enough of it could have been unwound by the middle of December, state legislators would have had something to think about in choosing their electors. But the genius of the scheme is that after the election, it simply had to rope-a-dope for 8 weeks, and the grinding of constitutional gears would do the rest of the work for them.


The Senate selected. Joe Biden became our President*. Yes, that really happened. Do not live in a delusion by believing some trap is going to spring, a storm is on its way, and so forth.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY


As I indicated in “How DJT Lost the White House, Chapter 4: The Christmas Doldrums (December 23- noon January 6)”, the Republican Party is a disgrace. Through this process I saw enough of them that I came to understand who they are. Other than a small number of strong players, it is mostly socialites and dilettantes, fat-cats and grifters (e.g., raising $300 million to help expose election fraud, then provide no apparent help: someone should look into where that $300 million went).


I advise the Reader: Never give a dollar to the Republican Party again.


In these recent months I met two people for whom I can completely vouch. Two people of whom I can say, “These two people are fully and entirely about helping the USA, and are not in it one iota for themselves.” Those two people are Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn. They have started an excellent organization, Defending the Republic, and they mean business. Give them whatever donations you would otherwise send the Republican Party. They will be splitting the money into two different endeavors: one is organized to fight election fraud, the other will be focused on finding the right candidates to back and fund.  If you want a one-stop shop, the one place you can give money to help the pro-freedom side, forget about the Republican Party, and remember Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn, and DefendingtheRepublic.org.


AMERICA’S MAYOR RUDY GIULIANI


I roasted Rudy harder than I might have. I wish to repeat again that I have been a long-term admirer of Rudy Giuliani. I always thought he was a great American. But at age 76 he was not the right man to manage an enormously complex litigation involving matters cyber, and certainly not while putting a lot of work into a daily podcast and tossing back triple-scotches like they’re going out of style. Rudy should have had better judgment than to try. I also believe he is driven by things like “jealousy over who gets airtime,” and not a guy used to working with or seeing females as equals.


In short, he’s Grandpa. I love Grandpa.  But I don’t think the fate of the free world should have hung on his shoulders. That was an unforced error on the part of President Trump. As much as I kick myself with should-haves and would-haves, at the end of the day I think that, given this one error, no victory was possible. Numerous people who worked with this team independently came to wonder who among its top members were working for the opposition: that is how weak it seemed. There were fine people on Rudy’s team lower down, but it was so horrible at the top that this one decision alone likely made victory impossible under any circumstances.


DONALD J. TRUMP


The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”   – Isiah Berlin


The astute reader will notice my ambivalence regarding President Trump. I have included flattering details as well as unflattering ones. I did so because I really did not intend this to be a polemic. I felt I owed it to our country to relate precisely what happened in those fateful days. I have.


What may I say about Donald  Trump? From my hours with him I can tell you he is a smart man, smarter than I expected. He is more soft-spoken and gracious than I had anticipated as well. He is not the monster the Mainstream Media wishes you to believe.


I also think Trump has a taste for chaos (someone pointed this out to me as a trait of those who grew up around alcoholism). One of my mentors taught me that the first task in any leadership situation is to determine, “What’s the mission and who is in charge?” One needs clear chains of command to focus an organization. President Trump’s leadership style (which is to throw a problem against the wall and have a crowd swarm in to fix it) seems more appropriate to me to running a branding and marketing company, than it is to someone running an operation (such as the USG) with millions of employees.


Significantly, I think Donald Trump is a 74 year old fellow who has lost a number of friends over the years, and like all men in that position, he perhaps clings to his remaining ones too closely. I was floating around inside his operation from the wheels up, and I saw what I saw: Rudy was not capable of managing anything like the effort this would have taken to defeat The Deep Rig. Thinking otherwise was an absurdity. I am not even sure Rudy wanted to.   Trump clung to Rudy, coming as he was from a place of loyalty, even after Rudy’s disastrous hair-dye-meltdown press conference, and telling me twice he would not entertain a solution that did not have Rudy at the helm. Donald Trump paid for his loyalty.


Here is another thing to know about President Trump: I look over all the evidence, his refusal to take the 3-foot putt, and it occurs to me that at some level Trump may have wanted to leave. Maybe it was his age, maybe it was threats to his family, but it is entirely possible that by the time I met him in December he was looking forward to moving on and golfing (as he slyly hinted to me when we met). He is 74, a tad heavier than he should be, statistically probably has 5-10 years to live, and may well not really have wanted to spend most of them doing what he did the last four.


If that is indeed the case… more power to him. It would have been better, though, for him to concede, and not to call millions of people to spend their savings to come defend him. I am not entirely certain he thinks in those terms, however.


I have indicated a lot of ambivalence about Donald Trump. But for the first time I have a clear understanding of the meaning of Donald J. Trump in our history. It is not about his mannerism, his hair, his speaking style, his management style…. What Donald Trump did is he figured out one big thing:


The people of our country are suffering because elites sold them out. The people can look at what has happened over the last 30 – 40 years, and know they have been sold out. They correctly understand that when they look at Trump they are not looking at an “elite” but one who wants to stand up (however coarsely) against the elites on their behalf. That is his source of appeal, and that is what causes so many to look the other way on his personal foibles.


The problem with that worldview is that Trump’s personal foibles leak into his management. Even his admirers within the administration told me that the chaos I was experiencing was par for the course for four years. Being President is not a branding exercise, and the management style one might take in approaching a branding exercise is not right for trying to run an administration.  President Trump fancies himself intuitive, not needing to do heavy homework (of, saying, reading his full PDB). In this case, that resulted in him not understanding his full powers or the varieties of courses of action that were available to him. He left the details in the hands of personnel, but his personnel choices were terrible.


Until he was elected President, Donald Trump had never spent one night in DC. Based on all that I observed, my guess is that the day Donald Trump fired Mike Flynn, his goose was cooked. For the next four years Trump got managed, he got handled, by the bureaucracy. It is indeed a wonder Trump got done what he did. But I am confident that had Mike Flynn been there history would have been completely different.


WHERE’S THE PROOF?


The same side maintaining there was no significant election fraud has since November 4 fought tooth-and-nail against allowing any real scrutiny of the systems to take place.


For example, back in November, in Nevada, a court gave some cyber-ninjas of my acquaintance an order allowing an “audit” of election machines in that county. That audit was thwarted by election officials who said, “It does not say ‘digital audit’, it does not say ‘forensic audit’,” and on that basis gave minimal compliance. They revealed some certifications but gave no access to inspect the machines. Similarly, in Arizona, currently, the Maricopa Board of Elections is refusing to honor a subpoena from the State Senate. And so on across the country: despite the most suspect election in American history unfolding before our eyes, there has to this day been almost 0 actual inspection of the systems and ballots (and what inspection has occurred, has been grossly exaggerated: e.g., Georgia). While these machines were sold to the states as offering transparency, in practice there has been overwhelming digging in of heels in against transparency since the day after the election, and every scrap of information we have obtained was fought for inch by inch. That is how they ran out the shot-clock on January 6.


By federal law, all the election materials used in the 2020 election must be preserved for 22 months. There are efforts alive to keep investigations running, court cases and Senate hearings and such. The opposition has achieved its primary objective: it made it impossible to audit any of those materials meaningfully before the Senate made its choice on January 6-7.  Now it continues the fight against transparency, knowing that revelations that might come from a full audit would shape Americans’ beliefs about the need to reform our election systems.


That’s odd, because one would think that if they actually believed their assertions of there being no fraud, they would welcome scrutiny to establish that election fraud had not dominated the election.


WHY DOES EVERYTHING SEEM SURREAL? THE WEAK HYPOTHESIS


You are living through a psyop (a psychological operation) being executed with military precision.


What scared both Flynn and me (and what drove us both forward whenever we asked each other, “What the hell are we doing here?”), was this possibility. It sounds far-fetched to most people, but we considered it an obvious possibility: what America has experienced for the last year has been a psyop, just like ones we have used to destabilize and impose regime change on other countries.


The stages of a regime-changing psyop are:

   1. Demoralization of the country.
   2. Disorientation.
   3. Crisis.
   4. Normalization.


It does not take much imagination to fit the events of the last year to this paradigm.

   1. Demoralization of the country – Covid-19.
   2. Disorientation – Antifa & BLM.
   3. Crisis –election counting stopped in 6 cities in 6 swing states, then a surprise happened.
   4. Normalization – the media gaslighting anyone who sees anything odd about the election.


How reasonable is that? How reasonable is it to suspect that Covid-19 has been used in a plan to hijack the USA? I am not referring to the origins of Covid-19, or asserting that it was deliberately released as part of such a plan. But once released, were there those who sought to make hay out of it? Is it possible to imagine that some people wanted the pandemic to be worse than it had to be? Let us look at some things that are now known to be true, but which caused mini-hysterias when they first arose in the public discourse a year ago.


Hydroxychloroquine


In 1983 a couple dozen other college students and I traveled to Asia for the first time to attend a semester in Beijing. We were all instructed to take Hydroxychloroquine prophylactically while there, increasing the dose at the onset of malarial symptoms. I stayed a year, then went and lived in the north of Thailand for five months, where in dusty one-shop villages I would invariably see on a shelf in that shop: one bottle containing aspirin, one bottle containing hydroxychloroquine, both sold by the pill for about 5 cents. When one had malarial symptoms, one bought a handful of hydroxychloroquine pills and treated oneself, just as if one had a tooth-ache one bought a handful of aspirin and treated oneself. Hydroxychloroquine was sold to kids with no more thought than one would give selling a few pills of aspirin to a 10 year old with a tooth-ache. Hydroxychloroquine had been around for decades back then: I vaguely remember some statistic like, “Of people who take it daily for 10 years, 2% will develop heart arrhythmias.” But other than that, and an understanding that when starting to take it one might experience a bit of dizziness, it was thought of as benign.


Thus it was with some surprise that early in this pandemic, when doctors started reporting results with early treatment of Covid-19 using hydroxychloroquine, the Mainstream Media went apoplectic. Talking heads on Mainstream Media discussed whether or not in extremis they would take hydroxychloroquine, as though they were discussing taking a radical new form of chemotherapy in the event they had cancer. Governors got into the act, and created special orders making it impossible for doctors to provide HCQ for off-label use to their Covid-19 patients (a rare moment for the government to rupture the privacy within such decisions are normally made). It reached such a fervor that Jim Acosta (CNN) attacked the president for, in a gathering of Covid-19 survivors, including some who had survived by way of Hydrochloriquine.


See Video


This hysteria continued over the course of summer 2020, costing countless lives by thwarting the ability of doctors to use it to snuff out the pandemic early on. In time, the hostility to HCQ abated, as it was discovered that the study upon which the WHO had made its original decision, had used fake data: BUSTED: W.H.O. And Global Governments Used Fake Data From A Suspicious Company, That Employs A Sci-Fi Writer And Adult-Content Model, To Discredit And Stop Hydroxychloroquine Studies (June 2020).

 

The HCQ Opinion War continued throughout Summer 2020.


    1. As was noted in the Israeli newspaper Arutz Sheva: “Media hostility to hydroxychloroquine fuels hysteria about supposed dangers” (July 9, 2020).

    2. Michigan Hospital Tries To Treat Patients with Hydroxychloroquine; “FDA Refuses To Allow It” (July 9, 2020).

    3. Hydroxy is being discounted TOO SOON, say scientists who believe the malaria drug could save “thousands of lives by preventing COVID-19” (August 2020).

    4. By September 2020, antagonism to HCQ had come to seem foolish not just in the alternative press, but to non-obsessed mass media: “The jury is in on Hydroxychloroquine – ‘it saves lives’: Rowan Dean".

    5. Now the point is no longer in serious dispute: see “HCQ is effective for COVID-19 when used early: real-time meta analysis of 201 studies”

    6. HCQ is effective for COVID-19 when used early: real-time meta analysis of 201 studies”


I v e r m e c t i n


This drug went through the same process of demonization by the Mainstream Media. Eventually, in the face of enough data regarding its efficacy having reached the public, the NIH softened its stance against Ivermectin.  The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons put out a statement welcoming that change: Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) Applauds NIH Revised Stance on Ivermectin for COVID-19.


“The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons [AAPS] notes that there are now 49 ivermectin studies summarized on c19study.com, 100 percent of which show favorable results” (from the report).


From Australia to South Africa, doctors are reporting rapid improvements in Covid-19 patients from this super-cheap and readily available drug. Ivermectin was another drug from which our betters protected us for months of this pandemic (instead of using these safe and dirt-cheap drugs to snuff out the pandemic early).

LOCKDOWNS


The Left has pushed for the most extreme lockdowns, while President Trump pushed for something more limited. Sweden, operating from a perspective that was science-based (rather than “hysteria-based” or “politically-based”), instituted a more limited lockdown than anything contemplated in the USA. Their model was to quarantine the vulnerable, yet have the rest of society continue with their lives while practicing modest social distancing, thus pursuing herd immunity and the least disruption to the economy and civil liberties of the citizens. In other words, the Swedish approach  was significantly more Trump than Trump (and the precise opposite of the app-roach demanded by the Left in America).


Sweden’s strategy turned out to be the best. The second wave they experienced was not larger than the first, Sweden avoided turning into a police state, and now Covid-19 deaths have tapered to 0 (see data and graphs on World Health Organization website):


Meanwhile, the rest of Europe and the industrialized world is experiencing a second wave more intense than the first, and deaths have most certainly not tapered to 0. For example, here are Covid-19 deaths in lockdown-mad Germany, France, and the UK over the last year.


Please note the scale dissimilarities, while Sweden has tapered to 0 deaths, Germany, France, and the UK are still experiencing daily deaths in the many hundreds and even over 1,000.

THE START OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC


On February 2, 2021, PBS ran a 90 minute documentary (“China’s Covid Secrets”), maintaining that the Covid-19 pandemic began in a Chinese lab accident and the CCP engaged in a cover-up. One year ago, nothing enraged the mass media more than people who espoused any form of this “conspiracy theory”. Yet now, like with Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, the people who were thought whacky a year ago, turn out to have been right.

SUMMARY ON COVID-19


The discourse around this pandemic has been distorted by people seeking to weaponize it politically. As a result, the pandemic inflected more harm on the United States than it had to. The Swedish, science-based approach, would have left us far better off as a country, with less harm to our economy and our civil liberties, than the path we took. Coupled with the use of two cheap, safe drugs that have been in use for decades, this entire pandemic might have been snuffed out in its infancy.


Yet one group consistently fought any such measured discourse, insisting instead on a reaction one marked by unscientific hysteria. Among the most extreme lock-down proponents in the USA have been Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and New York City’s Mayor Bill De Blasio. As soon as Biden’s inauguration was confirmed, some of the proponents of lock-down switched to a less hysterical position. In Chicago, Mayor Lightfoot, one of the most extreme proponents in the country of lock-down, recently decided that a much less stringent approach would be best: “Lightfoot Says Restaurants Should Reopen As Quickly As Possible “ (Patch, January 14, 2021). A similar pattern may be unfolding in New York City. If it is hard to imagine any politician being so cynical as to push for a lock-down that has destroyed millions of lives and tens of thousands of small businesses (60% of which will not reopen), simply in order to achieve political advantage…. then you don’t understand the Left.


Above I asked regarding Covid-19: “…once released, were there those who sought to make hay out of it? Is it possible to imagine that some people wanted the pandemic to be worse than it had to be?”  Make your own call.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


We now return to the structure of the psyop I hypothesize may exist:


1. Demoralization of the country – Covid-19;
2. Disorientation – Antifa & BLM;
3. Crisis – election counting stopped in 6 cities in 6 swing states, then a surprise
4. Normalization – the media gaslighting anyone who sees anything odd about the election.


Regarding Step #2 (Disorientation – Antifa & BLM), I saw it myself in DC this fall. I was walking in front of the J. Edgar Hoover Building (HQ to the FBI), when goons came roaring up on motorcycles and ATVs and took over the street, stopping traffic. They did wheelies and donuts for several minutes. Then they roared off. Directly in front of the FBI building: the uniformed guards at the FBI stood and watched. I understood it quite clearly to be a message: “This is not the FBI you thought it was, this is not the SUA you thought it was.” I realized that is what had been broadcast since June.


Regarding Step #3 (“Crisis – election counting stopped in 6 cities in 6 swing states, then a surprise happened”): I would call this election a crisis indeed, but I believe I have already covered this point thoroughly.


Regarding Step #4 (“Normalization – the media gaslighting anyone who sees anything odd about the election”). In September, just four months ago, the possibility of a massive election fraud occurring in the USA was (as I demonstrated in Chapter 1) perhaps the proposition that enjoyed more support across the political spectrum than any other one could name. Now the possibility has become inexpressible, even unthinkable, as far as our Mainstream Media is concerned. Even Right-of-Center Newsmax recently saw a host walk off its show, rather than participate in a conversation where the possibility was discussed.


So why do things seem surreal? Perhaps because you are living through a psyop to take over our country, and reality as you know it is being engineered. That’s the weak hypothesis.


WHY DOES EVERYTHING SEEM SURREAL? THE STRONG HYPOTHESIS


If the Weak Hypothesis is correct and we are living through a psyop, who is behind the psyop? China is behind the psyop.


I am not the proverbial Old China Hand, but decades ago I was once a Young China Hand. Since the Chinese publication in 1998 of: Unrestricted Warfare: Two Air Force Senior Colonels on Scenarios for War and the Operational Art in an Era of Globalization, by Qiao Liang  and Wang Xiangsui, it has been understood that hard-line elements within the Chinese National Security community have been envisioning and positioning themselves for war with the USA.  The “unrestricted” part of “unrestricted warfare” is the part that avoids direct military confrontation, and seeks instead to conquer through non-kinetic means.


In 2015, a lifelong China-dove (i.e., advocate of helping China stand up and prosper) named Michael Pillsbury wrote a book (The 100 Year Marathon) where he reversed course. He had been wrong all his professional life, he said, as he now understood that China had embarked on a 1949-2049 plan to turn the USA into a vassal state.  In this book, he discussed a phrase circulating in Chinese national security literature: the “Assassin’s Mace” it had in the works for the USA. The reference, Pillsbury knew, was to an old Chinese story from the Warring States period, and refers to, in essence, a sucker punch one-punch knockout.


Nothing would be more of an Assassin’s Mace than a scheme to take out the USA with a rigged election that could not be unscrambled through our court system by January 6, thus making the Constitutional gears to affirm what had been presented as a fait accompli.


Yet I am raising this not merely as a theoretical possibility. We discovered ample evidence of Chinese involvement in these election shenanigans. Go through the narrative that proceeds this, and note the mentions. Their money shows up in the firms supplying the election equipment in widest use; their IPs show up tickling our election equipment in countless places; receipts from their print shops show up on stacks of ballots in our election operations… DNI Ratcliffe belatedly delivered on January 7 his opinion: he sees more of the intelligence than anyone in government, and his conclusion was that the Chinese had meddled in the election.


If the Strong Hypothesis is correct and this is all a Chinese psyop, there is a way you will be able to be sure.  Authoritarian Chinese measures will be imposed on the US population (under the guise of stopping something vague like, “extremism”). President* Joe Biden will fill his administration with China-doves, and he will reverse an Executive Order of Trump’s to allow the Chinese to resume building components of our electoral grid. Because of the political discourse being constrained by Big Tech and authoritarian measures, within 10 years there will be prison camps in America built next to hospitals for the purpose of organ-harvesting from dissidents. By that time, Xi Jinping will have a button on his desk: one day he will hit it, the US electrical grid will shut down, and over the course of one year the United States will turn into a farm (which China’s 1.6 billion people will appreciate).


Those will be your signs that the Strong Hypothesis was correct.

THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND THE COMING(?) POLICE STATE


I know that some of the beliefs I have espoused here are not in synch with the times. Regarding my ability to maintain and publicly defend these beliefs, the First Amendment seems particularly on-point:


Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.


If our new Congress passes any bill criminalizing or penalizing people for challenging the integrity of the 2020 election, not only would it violate the First Amendment, but it would violate every principle on which this free country was founded and it would criminalize the conduct of every member of the “resist” movement and war that was waged on President Trump.  


So I say to the United States Department of Justice: you are going to need a test case. Choose me. I am not saying that in a James Cagney, “Come and get me, Coppers!” kind of way. I mean it respectfully but sincerely. If our rulers wish to claim that in America today, maintaining and expressing political beliefs such as mine ist jetzt völlig verboten, I’d really like to know. So I invite the DOJ to prosecute me for this three-part statement:




  ■  I acknowledge that Joe Biden proceeded successfully through the Article II Section 1 Constitutionally-mandated process that selects a president. He thus is, indeed, President. I also believe substantial irregularities affected the election process, and that those irregularities should be studied, discussed, and prosecuted in order to restore election integrity to our nation in time for the 2022 election. Because of these irregularities I will refer to him as, “President* Biden”.
  ■  In addition, to the degree that Biden tries to loosen rules governing future elections, or changes immigration policy so as to dramatically shift voter composition in the USA, I will claim it confirms my Weak Hypothesis: industrial-level election fraud rigged the election for Biden, the Left knows it, and wanting it to be locked in for future elections, they seek to change the rules and the electorate now.
  ■  In addition, behind some election irregularities I see the hand of China. Therefore, when President* Biden accommodates China through his appointments and Executive Orders, I will take it as establishing my Strong Hypothesis: we are experiencing a Chinese psyop to take over the United States without firing a shot.


I’ll be your huckleberry.


Patrick Byrne



NervyHitch.com